Stephan Verbücheln from CNLAB, the company that performed æternity’s security review before the launch of the Mainnet, had a surprise present for Yani and Thomas. What was it? The first volume of the PGP 6.5.1 source code printed on paper. Crazy right? But there is an interesting story behind this (taken from Wikipedia):

Shortly after its release in 1991, PGP encryption found its way outside the United States, and in February 1993 Phillip Zimmermann became the formal target of a criminal investigation by the US Government for “munitions export without a license”. Cryptosystems using keys larger than 40 bits were then considered munitions within the definition of the US export regulations; PGP has never used keys smaller than 128 bits, so it qualified at that time. Penalties for violation, if found guilty, were substantial. Zimmermann challenged these regulations in an imaginative way. He published the entire source code of PGP in a hardback book, via MIT Press, which was distributed and sold widely. Anybody wishing to build their own copy of PGP could cut off the covers, separate the pages, and scan them using an OCR program (or conceivably enter it as a type-in program if OCR software was not available), creating a set of source code text files. One could then build the application using the freely available GNU Compiler Collection. PGP thus became available anywhere in the world.

What is even more interesting is that on the day the present was delivered (May 24th, 2019) a news article was shared in the digital space announcing that that government officials in Germany are considering ways to force chat app providers to hand over end-to-end encrypted conversations in plain text on demand. As history shows us, however, this will not be an easy task. Stopping encryption is like stopping mathematics or the expression of free thought — it never works in the long run.

Cheers to encryption and to the House of Blockchain!

If you are interested in learning more about the HoB, visit their official website.

If you are into real blockchain technology, I highly recommend you to check out this short blog post introducing what æternity is and what are its main technological features:

I hope you enjoyed this!