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Really? Generating crytographic public keys, encryption, decryption, signing, ring signatures, Merkle Trees, cryptographic hashes, all this depends on blockchain? WOW!

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I too found it confusing when people started using "crypto" to be short for "cryptocurrency" (and later, all blockchain-related things) rather than "cryptography". However, that ship has sailed and as Moxie Marlinspike points out in his NFTs post [0], that's now a Pepperidge Farm Remembers meme. I've come to accept it as a shift in usage and using the older meaning of crypto will just result in miscommunication, like in this thread.

So, to answer your question: no, those things don't depend on blockchain, but they're also not "crypto", according to the current usage of the word.

[0] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

Well, these things are all used in crypto. And lots of other Web3 applications. None of them require a blockchain !

https://community.intercoin.org/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...

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