[danShumway]

One of the things that attracts me so much to general computing are the moments where I find something that I didn't think was possible. Not that it's a new invention or a new idea, but something that contradicts something I thought was fundamentally true about the world.

Homomorphic encryption is one of those things where I would have told you before learning about it that you have to decrypt information to do anything with it. That obviously you have to decrypt something to work with it. Which... maybe I'm just really simplistic, and I make brash assumptions about what is and isn't possible, but it often feels like a paradigm shift to me.

Public/private key cryptography was one another one of those moments; "wait, you mean I can have someone encrypt information without knowing how to decrypt it?" Zero-knowledge proofs are another one. Also when people started using quantum entanglement to tell if a key had been intercepted. This stuff is stupid, it shouldn't work. It feels obvious to me that it shouldn't be possible.

I dunno, it feels like a cheat code or something. Or better analogy, being given a brand new mechanic in a video game level. It's like the first time that you rotate the world in Fez.