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RE: Commodity or Currency? Why No One Can Figure Out How to Classify Cryptoassets

Cryptoasset and are misnomers although it is widely used, IMHO.

I call them virtual assets - even "digital asset" is incorrect, IMHO.

A long time ago, computer scientists had to make a choice of how to design and create computational machines:

  • analog
  • digital

When I was in Chemical Engineering studies, I learned the power of analog and symbolic computation - they are far more powerful than the choice of digital computing.

The rational at that time was human labor was cheaper than computer memory and processing power. It is simpler and required lower skills to write computer programs for digital computation than for analog or symbolic computation.

Anything of value that exist only in the electronic form should be an "virtual asset" and they include:

  • unique values such as an "identifier" or "address"
  • unique image, an electronic data structure that can be used to re-create an image
  • unique data, an electronic data structure that can be used to communicate with humans or other electronic devices

Cryptography was the technology used in creating the blockchain which gives it the security, uniqueness and limited supply. However, it is not the only technology that could provide the same features. Furthermore, as technology advances, the required features will certainly change - witness the smart contract as the first of such feature.

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In fact, public key encryption is an old technology:

The History of Cryptography - Stanford CS - Stanford University
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/.../public-key-cryptography/history.htm...
The idea of public key cryptography was first presented by Martin Hellman, Ralph Merkle, and Whitfield Diffie at Stanford University in 1976. They used a method which they referred to as the subset-sum problem, but which has been come to be known as the knapsack problem.

Understanding Public Key Cryptography and the History of RSA ...
https://www.securityweek.com/understanding-public-key-cryptography-and-history-rsa
Feb 23, 2012 - Public key cryptography uses two different keys at once, a combination of a private key and a public key. Learn more about public-key encryption and how it works and a history of RSA, the ones responsible for the breakthrough algorithm back in 1978