Kind: captions
Language: en
the history of cryptography for
thousands of years is defined by one
single problem no matter how you make
your code right the key that you use to
encrypt the message needs to be the same
key as the other person has to decrypt
it
the important work of decoding
the problem with that is that if anybody
figured out the secret code well then
you were kind of out of luck they could
Now read all of the messages that you
were going to send back and forth
this is what happens when the Allies
famously cracked the code of the
German's Enigma machine in World War II
and helped turn the tide of the war
that was the fundamental limit to your
ability to create secret messages for
all of human history until the 1970s
when a group of computer scientists make
a series of extraordinary breakthroughs
breakthrough was figuring out how to
replace the vulnerable single key system
with a novel two-key approach
each side holds a pair of mathematically
linked Keys essentially a string of
characters one shared publicly the other
kept private the sender encrypts the
message using the recipient's public key
the message can only be unscrambled
using the recipient's private key
the sender can also use their private
key to encode a unique digital signature
into the message proving that they sent
it the thing that's really cool about
this is that I don't need to know your
secret key no one needs to know your
secret key it never leaves your device
or your piece of paper or your home it
stays completely secret the only thing
that leaves is a public key and I can't
figure out what your secret key is from
your public key
as long as everyone's private Keys stay
private secret messages are essentially
uncrackable
and signatures can't be forged
the trick lies in how the keys are
linked
through a type of math problem using
large prime numbers which is easy to
compute in One Direction but nearly
impossible to reverse engineer
it's very easy to take a set of factors
and see that they multiply to a number
it's very very hard to take a large
number and figure out what the factors
are that divide into it
would have required even someone with a
super computer you know hundreds or
thousands of years to try to break the
cryptography and get access to the
information that is a revolutionary
change in the world up to that point we
were all kind of helpless against
efforts by those forces that would
Target us and now suddenly mathematics
had given us this amazing gift this this
tool that we could now use to
communicate secretly in a way that even
those large forces cannot corrupt
a column in Scientific American
described the Breakthrough
but the actual algorithms remained
unpublished in a paper at MIT
Miller feared the approach known as
public key encryption was so powerful
that the government might try to
classify it as a military Secret
I saw this as a hard fork in the road
that was bigger than me and I decided I
have to do what I can to make sure that
this idea is not suppressed
so I went to the MIT campus and I hung
around and talked to people until
finally I managed to get my hands on a
paper copy I went to a variety of coffee
shops never made too many copies in any
one place
and I mailed it from a variety of
mailboxes to home and hobbyist computer
magazines and clubs all across the
country and I also gave copies of the
paper to a few select friends of mine
telling them if I disappear make sure
this gets out
I have absolutely no idea and I will
never have any idea whether my actions
had any influence at all but the cat was
out of the bag
the paper was eventually published in
1978 and the ideas spread like wildfire
the Government tried to keep these
algorithms from the public but
determined to fight against centralized
control programmers put the codes on
everything from t-shirts to their own
bodies
cryptographers were in the unique
position especially once people started
getting tattoos of this string of
characters of being able to say like
characters and martial arts movies that
their bodies were classified as deadly
weapons
[Music]
some coders joined forces working in
loose groups to design Technologies
including new forms of money that could
free people from centralized control we
could call them Visionaries we could
call them radicals we could also call
them weirdos eccentric technologically
sophisticated very smart deeply strange
people who wanted to change the world
through transforming how money worked
[Music]
they anticipated that there was a coming
economy that was going to be built
around all of our data the surveillance
of our data set very soon we were all
going to be living more and more of Our
Lives communicating through digital
Technologies and a crucial piece of this
puzzle that hadn't really ever been
fully solved was figuring out how to do
money online where will you find a world
of ideas for your child
for the first time public key encryption
made it possible to securely use credit
cards and conduct other Private Business
online without it online Commerce might
never have become a reality but for
activist coding groups the fact that
Banks and credit card companies kept a
ledger of all transactions opened the
door for Big Brother
the most infamous of these groups was
known as The Cypher punks their culture
was hey we want to create privacy
because we can see where this is going
they had the foresight to see that any
big Enterprise there are going to be big
companies and and Regulators who will
try and control it The Cypher punks
mostly communicated through a mailing
list
the hardcore of the cypherpunks look to
digital money as a way to not just
guarantee privacy but as a way that they
could potentially destroy existing
governments and States completely
it was basically developers creating
tools for freedom and one of those tools
was digital cash not just digital
transactions like the banks were
providing but a new kind of money
altogether
across dozens of new forums there were a
number of attempts to design a system of
digital cash and then on Halloween 2008
a new name Satoshi Nakamoto appeared
enter Bitcoin called by its inventor a
peer-to-peer electronic cash system even
now no one knows who Satoshi Nakamoto
the inventor of Bitcoin is but the paper
was revolutionary
this is one of the most significant
Technologies in recent human history to
have been created by someone who is
still wholly anonymous who is Satoshi is
a question that may never be answered
but in actuality that sort of Mystique
is kind of what adds to the lore that
made Bitcoin really interesting to begin
with I think
when you look at who satashi could be
could have taken quite a long time ago
whoever Satoshi is it's amazing that
they were able to fit all of what they
wanted Bitcoin to be in eight pages
satoshi's paper synthesized Decades of
work by hundreds of cryptographers and
computer scientists into an elegant
whole it showed how to create a digital
payment system based on a new currency
that eliminated banks
at the exact moment the 2008 financial
crisis shook the public trust that gave
them their power it was a manic Monday
in the financial markets
the Dow tumbled more than 500 people
were like if the world's Financial
economy is you know like taking a big
hit how do we make ourselves more
anti-fragile towards these things in the
future what Bitcoin proposed to do with
Satoshi proposed to do was produce a
kind of digital cash that didn't require
those intermediaries instead of
transactions going through a web of
connected computers owned by Banks and
other intermediaries it would go through
a web of connected computers owned by
the people conducting that transaction
[Music]
Bitcoins were simply Bits of computer
code in a digital Ledger
this person would hold their coins in an
anonymous digital wallet identified only
by its public key
the holder of that wallet could only
spend those coins by using their private
key to sign the transfer and authorize
the transaction
but the real breakthrough was something
called the blockchain a technology that
ensured The Ledger hadn't been tampered
with and that people hadn't spent the
same coin more than once all without
needing a bank or other Central
authority to keep track