# Impossible, Possible, and Practical

**Published by:** [jer979](https://paragraph.com/@jer979-2/)
**Published on:** 2022-10-09
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@jer979-2/impossible-possible-and-practical

## Content

There was a line in Simon Singh’s The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography , that jumped out at me for its brilliance and its obviousness at the same time. One of the challenges in cryptography was to develop a one-way function that could be part of the solution to the key distribution problem…namely, how can you ensure that someone can read your encrypted message without physically giving them the unlock key, while ensuring that no snoopers can read it either. There were two teams working on this problem concurrently, one in the US, one in Britain. The British team figured it out first, but because they worked in a top-secret government facility, they couldn’t publish their findings. However, they had made a breakthrough, but even though they had figured it out in theory, no one could work it out in practice. As Singh writes:“Cocks and Ellis had proved that the apparently impossible was possible, but nobody could find a way of making the possible practical.” (page 286)When I read this, I couldn’t help but think about crypto assetss. What Satoshi and Vitalik did was make the apparently impossible (‘double spend’ and decentralized contracts) possible. We’re still working on ways to make it practical. This is what I’ve been saying. The innovation is over. Now it’s the engineering. And that will get solved.

## Publication Information

- [jer979](https://paragraph.com/@jer979-2/): Publication homepage
- [All Posts](https://paragraph.com/@jer979-2/): More posts from this publication
- [RSS Feed](https://api.paragraph.com/blogs/rss/@jer979-2): Subscribe to updates
- [Twitter](https://twitter.com/jer979): Follow on Twitter