“Cryptoria, from Turing to Nakamoto” tells us everything behind Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. From the foundations of logic and mathematics to modern sciences of cryptology and computing that made this technology possible.
Content table
Editorial data
Alfre Mancera: Cryptory: from Turing to Nakamoto (printed). Promises; 2024. ISBN 978-9916-4-2572-5
Front page
The cover, in black and white, shows masked faces in which only your eyes are visible. On each side there are two profile faces looking towards the center with their eyes closed. In the center there is a single face looking straight ahead. The title of the book and the name of the author stand out in red, and the subtitle and editorial appear in gray. The masks are reminiscent of those used on the cover of the Wired magazine of May 1993, with the title Cypherpunks.
Structure
(For space reasons, we have left out-chapters and sub-sub-caps that are listed in the book index. The division into parts 1 and 2 does not appear in the index, but in the body of the text.)
Part 1. At
- 1. The beginning of the end
- Choose your own adventure
- 2. In search of the truth
- 3. The numbers will make you free
- 4. The mathematics of secret
Part 2. dt
- 5. Modern computer science
- 6. Dawn of strong cryptography
- 9. Privacy soldiers
Content: narrative, historical, explanatory
The book has numbered pages from 19 to 267, with 15 × 21 dimensions. It contains illustrations that help to understand some of the mathematical and technical concepts that are explained throughout the text. For example, real tables, information flow in public key encryption systems or a modular clock. Several of these illustrations are handmade, instead of technical precision. In addition to that, it contains aesthetic details, such as showing the number of chapter in binary numbers, which appeal to the sensitivity of readers.
It has eleven chapters of various extensions, in which the development of logic and mathematics is counted, first; and of cryptography and computing, towards the end, to culminate with the invention of Bitcoin.
While many of the concepts that you introduce are material of university courses and could be complicated to understand for those who are not familiar with the disciplines that treat them, the way of presenting them is simple and bearable.
The book presents a rich collection of bibliographic sources so that the reader can deepen more in any of the topics discussed if he wished.
Style
The book has a mostly narrative and informal style. While most of the text consists of the personal and intellectual stories of several of the relevant characters, the author does not deprive himself of inserting personal comments for the reader.
Several times you can find “alerts of burrow”, in which the author warns that some topic discussed is extended much more than the text will address, and invites the reader to continue investigating him. The author also allows you to throw the occasional joke or word game to entertain reading.
Book content
The title of the book is a condensation of the words “crypto cryptology” and “history”, that is, a Cryptology History and of those who developed it. The first two sections before the numbering (preface and Alize) introduce the rest of the book, which does not contain an introduction as such. Alize (which is after the preface, but before chapter 1) is separated from the rest of the text as a small science fiction history with touches of humor.
He Chapter 1 begins telling the stories of Alan Turingthe father of computing; of the cryptologist John Irving Good and that of the eugenics. It is interrupted by a brief interval called “Choose your own adventure”, which offers us to continue chapters 2 and 3 to make a retrospective of logical and mathematical thinking from its origins; or jump to chapter 4 to continue with the history of Turing.
These two personalities, Turing and Good, worked together deciphering German cryptography in World War II. As for eugenics, it is not related to the rest of the story for at least half of the book, but towards the end the author ties the ends.
Parts 1 and 2 are not in the book index, but make a difference between a period prior to Turing and a posterior one.
He Chapter 2 Explain the foundations of logic, arithmetic and mathematics from Aristotlecontinuing with Zenon, Crisipo and then Euclid. Chapter 3 continues with the developments of Descartes, Leibniz, Gauss, Fermat, Euler, Boole, Frege, Singer, Whitehead and Russel. Presents the advances that will later be relevant to computing such as set theorythe formal languagesthe Modular arithmetic and the Boole’s algebra. It ends with Gödel and its Incompletion theoremsas well as the Entscheidungsproblem (Decision problem) in computing.
He Chapter 4 is about the Cryptologythe discipline composed of cryptography (write encrypted messages) and cryptoanalysis (decipher encrypted messages). Comment on some historical uses of encryption systems, and then go through Kerckhoffs and its principles of military cryptography, continuing Turing developments during World War II. The chapter culminates with the death of Turing and the beginning of computing science.
The following chapters include computing and cryptography developments during the following decades. The figure of Claude Shannon; and those of Hellman, DIFFIE and Merkle, who invented the asymmetric cryptography. Throughout the book, the relevance of Jude Milhon“The Holy Protective of the Hackers” and coin of the term Cypherpunk.
Towards the last part it presents to the key figures of the Cypherpunk and cryptover movement: Tim May, David Chaum, John Perry Barlow, Eric HughesPhil Zimmerman, Adam Back, Wei Dai, Nick Szabo, Hal Finney. Also talk about Transhumanists and Extropyits relationship with the old eugenics and its connection with the aforementioned techno-political movement.
The last chapter, very brief, is dedicated to Nakamoto and the invention of Bitcoin.
Final comments
Cryptory is an important book for the library of all Hispanic -speaking bitcoiner. While most of the content is known information from the history of various disciplines, the Synthesis and presentation work in Spanish Of all the material by Alfre Mancera is remarkable.
It is not a recommended book to start in Bitcoin, since it hardly speaks of bitcoin or cryptocurrencies, but of everything that is around them. The central idea is to explain all the theoretical and technological advances that made Bitccoin exist. Also, in part, a little demystifies the figure of Satoshi Nakamoto, which sometimes is presented as a lonely genius that Bitcoin invented from nothingand puts it in a context: decades of searching for a digital money -based money that developed for centuries.
Nor is it a book that is thoroughly on certain aspects of cryptocurrencies and presents new reflections or observations. It is a perfect book for intermediate Bitcoiners, which already understand technology and want to know more: its history, the mathematical concepts behind, the political ideas that inspired it, etc. He presents a summary of Bitcoin’s prehistory and shows us the doors to continue exploring his secrets.
