> Not at all, what I am saying is that "Don't roll your own crypto" mono-culture makes impossible for people to grasp the basics of crypto. To be brutally fran

> Not at all, what I am saying is that "Don't roll your own crypto" mono-culture makes impossible for people to grasp the basics of crypto. To be brutally frank with you: most people are not qualified to implement their own cryptography, and you cannot become qualified if you skip the significant prerequisites. Much like computer science in general, cryptography is not comparable to software engineering or programming. You can learn e.g. web development in a piecemeal, circuitous fashion. You cannot learn cryptography that way - you’d first need to understand advanced mathematics (abstract algebra, number theory, probability theory, maybe some game semantics) and computational complexity. Then you need to thoroughly understand the existing algorithms before you figure out how they can be (safely) improved. Attempting to develop novel cryptosystems (“roll your own crypto”) without this background is irresponsible. It’s not that it’s impossible to grasp the basics, rather it’s that you need to be willing to work through a significant amount of material before you can even understand what your “unknown unknowns” might be. To put it very succinctly, would you attempt to publish new research in computer science or mathematics without significant training in either?