Also, we shouldn't forget his hashing algorithm, scrypt, powers a popular cryptocurrency with a market cap over 3 Billion USD. Colin has added so much beyond 'backups' and should feel quite accomplished in his technical contributions to society. I am glad he has the commercial independence to follow his dreams, rather than being trapped in academia.
Colin, you are an inspiration. You have achieved so much and I can't wait to see what comes next.
Frankly, working backups are good enough because his service has allowed people to recover from disaster. Hope instead of misery is a fine way to spend one's life.
> scrypt, powers a popular cryptocurrency with a market cap over 3 Billion USD
For those who (like me) were wondering what cryptocurrency this was referring to: Litecoin has a ~$3B market cap and uses scrypt. Dogecoin also uses it but has a much smaller market cap, closer to $350M.
scrypt is an interesting choice for cryptocurrencies because it does not only need a significant amount of compute resources – which can be scaled using GPUs to perform huge amounts of work in parallel – but also requires large amounts of memory which is much more difficult to scale to the same level.
> In 2009, having had many users ask for passphrase-protected Tarsnap key files, and having determined that the current state of the art of password based key derivation was sorely lacking, I invented scrypt — and in the process, opened up a whole new field of cryptography. Sure, I was doing this because it was something I could do to make Tarsnap more secure; but it would be a stretch to place this under the umbrella of "spending my time working on backups".
Colin, you are an inspiration. You have achieved so much and I can't wait to see what comes next.