In 1978, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman published a paper that changed everything.
They introduced RSA encryption, a mathematical proof that you could send a message across an open network and guarantee that only the intended recipient could read it.
Before RSA, secure communication required physical key exchanges, trusted couriers, and locked briefcases. It was slow, expensive, and didn’t scale.
After RSA, encryption became infrastructure.
Privacy stopped being a luxury reserved for governments and militaries. It became a foundational layer that the entire internet could build on top of.
Banking, Email, E-commerce, none of it would exist without the ability to keep data private while still proving authenticity.
The problem is, blockchain never got its RSA moment.
We built a financial system on glass, every transaction visible, every wallet balance public, every trade exposed.
And we convinced ourselves that transparency was the innovation.
But transparency isn’t what unlocks adoption, controlled privacy is.
A 🧵