Old Skool Webcomic

Almost There

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Comic Transcript

A: If blockchain is so important to verifying that crypto transactions are legitimate, how can off-chain transactions even happen?

B: I already told you. You swap encryption keys.

A: That means almost nothing to me.

B: All cryptocurrency is encrypted: that’s why you call it “crypto” currency. The encryption has a public key, which everyone can see, and a private key, which only the owner has. So if I give you the private key for a crypto coin, you are effectively the owner of that crypto coin, because you have the private key.

B: So if you want one of these Companies That Should Not Be Described As Banks Under Any Circumstances to manage your cryptocurrency transactions, you give them all your private keys, and they trade the keys.

A: Doesn’t that mean someone can just steal your private keys off one of these company servers and then poof, all your cryptocurrency is gone?

B: Yes. In fact, that’s already happened! People tend to store their private keys in password-protected programs called “crypto wallets,” and there are already incidents where crypto thieves guess weak crypto wallet passwords and empty them out.

A: That sounds terrible and horrifying.

B: Which means we’re finally ready to talk about NFTs!


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9 comments

selwyn 2 February 2022 at 11:27 AM

Thank you very much for you return to the comics. And thank you very much for this wonderful an highly educational onslaught.

With best wishes and as always with a sincere “Desperately unfunny”. πŸ™‚

Reply
C. B. Wright 2 February 2022 at 11:46 AM

I’m glad people are enjoying the series. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the idea that I’ve “returned to comics,” though. I don’t think I have it in me to keep this up on a regular schedule.

Of course, I didn’t really have it in me before, either. πŸ˜€

Reply
ysth 3 February 2022 at 1:32 PM

Finally ready!

I know it’s “correct”, but I so hate the comma inside the quotes thing (β€œcrypto wallets,”).

I’ve been sharing this story, and hating on wordpress for tags always showing newest to oldest.

Reply
C. B. Wright 3 February 2022 at 10:14 PM

I figured out how to fix that!

You just add “/?order=asc” to the end of the link:

https://www.eviscerati.org/tags/story-nfts/?order=asc

… now I just need to figure out how to make it an automatic part of the tags link…

Reply
Andy Konecny 4 February 2022 at 12:32 PM

This so fits with/compliments what Cory Doctorow just wrote about this house of cards
https://onezero.medium.com/when-crypto-exchanges-go-broke-youll-lose-it-all-53cfd3c4476
I’ve been wanting to share this series with some others, and now I finally have link to share for this series as well as a useful trick to try for other tags elsewhere.

Thank you on all fronts

PS: was the head shave experiment a success?

Reply
C. B. Wright 4 February 2022 at 3:35 PM

Well I’m still shaving my head, so I guess it’s a success so far!

Reply
Mark 6 February 2022 at 1:36 PM

I’m still stunned that you snuck a PC Town in there somewhere!

Reply
ysth 6 February 2022 at 3:00 PM

Yay, thanks for the asc link!

Reply
ysth 7 February 2022 at 3:13 PM

Jake gets to talk, if not get up πŸ™‚

Reply

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