[josephlord]

You can PLAY with crypto, discuss it try things out and have fun with it. After you have been doing that and hanging out in the right circles for a few years, reading lots and probably breaking other people's ideas and implementations not just yours then you will be some sort of position to judge whether your work may be safe to unleash on the public as anything more than a low security experiment.

One of the problems is with security and crypto is that the people who really understand it make fairly weak promises such as that it is "Pretty Good Privacy" but the incompetent, greedy or malicious make strong marketing claims about the security that they are offering. Emphasis on incompetent in the Cryptocat case.

Crypto is an area where the Dunning Kruger effect[1] seems both especially strong and especially dangerous.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect