What is Financial Cryptography?
Recent discussions have brought up that old confusion, just exactly what is FC? I put down my view of that in FC7. Whether that’s a good view only time will tell, and whilst not universally accepted, criticisms seem to be limited to “why isn’t this or that in the layers?” The question of FC is at the core of what the FC conference, starting this week, should be about. It’s about why people should go and what they should expect to find at the conference, so the definition is something to think about. Here’s my attempt to map it out. First spot goes to Bob H who invented the term. Now, I don’t know that he ever defined it directly, but he did define it by elimination: financial cryptography is the only cryptography that’s important. That’s a reversable definition – if it matters, it’s FC. Bob’s definition does several things for us. Firstly, it establishes a value metric – there has to be a value involved, in order to ‘be important.’ Thus, it eliminates the military, government and ‘nati
