Voxels (VOX) — Future of Virtual Reality

Voxels (VOX) — Future of Virtual Reality

Hardik Gandhi   February 02, 2018

Imagine if you could capitalize on the explosive growth of cryptocurrencies and the power of virtual reality in one investment. Would that be something you’d be interested in? I sure am. That’s why I am buying up all the Voxels I can get, which is currently trading at $.23. Believe me when I say that Voxel will be the OFFICIAL currency of virtual reality. This cryptocurrency has been created by Voxelus, a leading virtual reality world builder and marketplace, AND it’s compatible with Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR. As of today, Voxelus is the world’s largest source of virtual reality content, with more than 500 unique assets, 50 working games, and 7,000 additional pieces of content through their partnerships. I can confidently say that in 2020 Voxels could be trading at $1.50 a coin because the team is lead by legendary entrepreneur Halsey Minor, have strategic partnerships, an upcoming release of their first standalone game, and several other drivers of growth that I will outline below.

Basics:

1. Voxelus is a platform that allows anyone, anywhere to create and play VR games without needing to write a single line of code
2. The platform consists of the Voxelus Creator, a 3D design app for PC and Mac; Voxelus Viewer, which works on desktop PCs, Oculus Rift, and Samsung VR devices; Voxelus Marketplace, which allows creators to sell and user to buy VR content and games for the Voxelus ecosystem
3. The only form of payment within this ecosystem is Voxel, the in-game cryptocurrency
4. Ticker: VOX
   Price: $.23
   Ranking by Market Cap: 70
   Market Capitalization: $47,036,640
   Circulating Supply: 210,000,000 VOX
   Max Supply: 210,000,000 VOX
   Average Trading Volume: $8,316,144
   Consensus: PoW

Team:

1. The Voxels team is lead by no other legendary entrepreneur than Halsey Minor. Mr. Minor was the founder of CNET, co-founder of Google Voice, Salesforce.com, OpenDNS, Uphold, and Rhapsody.
2. The development team is led by Argentinean software industry veteran Martin Repetto. Mr. Repetto previously created, Atmosphir, a video game creation tool that was the runner up on the TechCrunch 50 in 2008. He was also the CEO of Minor Studios.
3. The business development and marketing teams are based in Los Angeles. The development and operations teams are located in Rosario, close to Buenos Aires, Argentina
4. As of 2016, the Voxels team has 10 individuals working on this project full time

Drivers of Growth:

1. Simply put, the team. Mr. Minor is arguably the most impressive and seasoned leader I have ever come across in the cryptocurrency space. He will squeeze every ounce of value out of this project
2. The Voxels team is on the verge of launching their first standalone game, Xtraction Royale. The game will be compatible with Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Steam VR. These are all large VR platforms with a good portion of the total VR market share
3. Voxels has engaged in a recent partnership with Flatpyramid.com, which will give Voxels users access to 7,000 digital assets like animated characters and environments
4. The team established the Voxel Foundation to help expand Voxel’s ecosystem to a variety of network games, VR platforms, and various entertainment outlets. The team has dedicated $5 Million Voxel towards this effort, with the option to add an additional $10 million
5. The team is currently undergoing a rebranding effort that should help boost their market exposure and increase public awareness. They have also alluded to introducing a newly formed partnership once the rebranding has been completed
6. Voxel has multi-platform wallets for MAC, PC, and Linux
7. It has been estimated that the market value for VR in 2020 will exceed $40 billion and Voxels will be at the epicenter of that explosive growth. Current market value for VR is about $6 billion

Headwinds:

1. Both VR and cryptocurrency are very young, evolving types of technology, so there will be lots of growing pains as a result. However, this team is lead by arguably the best leader which will help them navigate through the turbulent times
2. Since regulation will always trail innovation, the digital currency space can be subject to new regulations in the future
3. As of now, Voxels’s growth has happened purely through word of mouth. There has currently been no marketing dollars spent on this project

Summary:

Since this project is so unique we will have to do a little math and make some assumptions to get our price target. The current market value for VR is about $6 billion and the price of Voxels is:

1. Price: $.23
   Ranking by Market Cap: 70
   Market Capitalization: $47,036,640
   Circulating Supply: 210,000,000 VOX

As I previously mentioned, it is estimated that the market value for VR will reach $40 billion by 2020. So, if you apply the same growth rate to Voxel’s current price, it would be valued at about $1.50 a coin in 2020. However, this is assuming that Voxels market share stays the same into 2020, but I will promise you it will only grow from here.

Voxels Team… Let’s change the world!!

Source:Hacker Noon

The User Experience of Lootboxes

The User Experience of Lootboxes

Hardik Gandhi   January 28, 2018

I hope you like GIF’s. I brought GIF’s.

Disclaimer: In real life, when I’m not pretending I know how to write, I work for a gambling company here in Australia. This means that lootboxes — gambling — in video games is a unique point of interest for me. I’m not a gambler in any sense, but I deal with the industry on a daily basis. I think this gives me a unique perspective on the topic, and I want to be up front about where I’m coming from when I talk about it.

I believe gambling is much like drinking or smoking — it’s harmful to millions of people, and requires a significant effort by both gambling corporations and governments to regulate the medium effectively. I also, however, believe that just like drinking and smoking, it is an adults choice to participate in any form of gambling.

In gaming, gambling takes a different tone. There are very, very few barriers in most games for minors to participate in lootboxes, which absolutely are gambling. I believe there is an inherent ethical responsibility on any developer or publisher to put safeguards in place to protect kids. I also believe that it is the governments responsibility to enforce strict regulations on developers on how, and when, they institute gambling systems in games.

The views expressed in this article do not reflect the views of Tabcorp in any way. These are my own personal opinions.

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I hope you like GIF’s. This article has a few.

Lootboxes were the number one gaming story of 2017. More specifically, games like Star Wars Battlefront 2 — a relatively good game in it’s own right that was significantly hampered by it’s extremely heavy-handed micro-transaction system.

I don’t want to dwell on the ethics or merits of these systems (I’ve done that enough in the disclaimer), but what I do want to talk about is how — from a UX perspective — these systems work and affect players.

I will say, however, that I unequivocally do not support games that put gameplay upgrades (especially those that grant power in a competitive setting) behind a paywall — commonly referred to as pay-to-win. I’m talking about games like FIFA Ultimate Team, Star Wars Battlefront 2, and to a lesser extent, Fortnite. Players shouldn’t have to pay money to have a better experience than other players.

There’s some key techniques successful lootboxes use to create an exciting opening experience — let’s see what they are:

Artificial Scarcity

Rarity is a massive driver in games. As soon as something is rare, it becomes intrinsically valuable to a player. This makes sense in the real world — there’s not much gold, so that which exists has value. In the digital world, everything is only as rare as a developer makes it.

Lootboxes often use thematic visual changes to represent time gates on certain boxes. Card packs or crates that are only available for certain periods have a unique style, so you feel as though you need to get it now, or you’ll miss out. This combines a sense of urgency and rarity — something that can powerfully influence a players’ decision to purchase.

Hearthstone’s extra touch — mousing over an unrevealed card gives you a glimpse of it’s rarity.

‘The Old Gods’ expansion features Lovecraftian-style packs.

Hearthstone is a good example of this. Each new expansion has it’s own card-pack style. It makes them feel special, and also gives that message that they’re new, or limited.

‘Knights of the Frozen Throne’ took a frostier route.

Hearthstone doesn’t remove these card packs for purchase, so there is technically no urgency (other than the need to have the best cards to stay competitive, of course), but the visual styling still motivates purchases.

EA Sports FIFA series actually does this a bit better. Their Ultimate Team mode has card packs that players can purchase (more on that later) that award football players for your teams.

This is an extreme example, but many players will genuinely have 6–8 versions in the game, most of which are time-sensitive rewards.

EA releases new, upgraded versions of players every week, alongside with regular events throughout the season. If you don’t buy packs that week/event, you can’t get that version of the player.

It’s very, very effective when your favourite player has a special edition card that you want. I may or may not have been brainwashed by this trick. More than once. Like, a lot, actually.

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The Drumroll

Early lootboxes were simple — purchase me and get some loot. A few years ago, though, things got a little complex. Lootboxes started opening with some fancy graphics and cool effects. A big shift was what I call the drumroll. It’s that moment between clicking ‘Open’ and finding out what you’ve got, where often the box will reveal something about your rewards.

I’ve opened hundreds of these, but only just noticed that the box has disappeared when the camera comes back down…

This Overwatch box is a great example. There’s a moment where the rewards are spinning through the air and you catch a glimpse of the rarity of what you’re getting. When you see the orange glow of a legendary skin, it’s exciting and builds anticipation. Likewise, if you open 20 boxes and don’t get to see that orange hue, there’s tangible disappointment.

FIFA does this well, also. When you open a pack, the animation changes depending on the best player you recieve. Take a look at the three animations below:

A pack with a gold-ranked, non-rare player.

A pack with a gold-ranked, rare player.

A pack with a gold-ranked, rare, high-rated player.

The first two are relatively subtle, but even from the first moment of opening there’s some additional gold effects and a slightly different split effect for the rare opening.

The third opening is referred to as a ‘Walkout’ in the community — it’s reserved for highly rated players, and the player animation is personalised to one that player is known for in real life. When the billboards pop out of the pack, you immediately know you’re up for a good player. If that player jumps on screen, you’ve got one of the best in the game.

The excitement in these effects don’t start at the reveal, however. The excitement builds from the moment the pack starts to split and you recognise the unique effect that tells the player they’re in for something good.

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The Big Reveal

As you might expect, the grand reveal is the most important part of any lootbox. This is where the player experiences limitless euphoria or bitter disappointment.

Ironically, there’s not too much to say about this. The boxes we’ve looked at so far are great examples of fun reveal moments; Hearthstone’s slow card-turn, FIFA’s staggered reveal of country, then position, then team, and finally the player’s name and portrait.

So, to change things up, let’s look at a few that I think are bad at this:

The infamous lootbox of Star Wars Battlefront 2

Star Wars Battlefront 2 drew so much ire in 2017 for offering powerful player upgrades in their lootboxes. They got slammed for this choice and, in turn, made some changes. It didn’t mean much though. What’s staggering is that despite this huge focus on a microtransaction model, the animation sucks. The holographic reveal has no impact, the color codes aren’t vibrant or exciting, and most packs came with intangible junk anyway. Boring.

I don’t remember this scene from Saving Private Ryan.

Call of Duty WWII had you call in ‘Supply Drops’ in a player populated hubspace between matches. This was a pretty transparent mechanism to show players who weren’t buying boxes just how much fun everyone else was having with their loot. The card flip lacks impact for me, and there’s no real drumroll beyond waiting for the cards to turn. Not great.

No Llamas were harmed in the making of Fortnite. Or so I’m told.

Aesthetically, I actually really like Fortnite’s loot-llamas. It’s also a relatively generous loot model, although it loses any possible browny points by having tangible upgrades locked behind purchasable lootboxes. Overall, it’s a creative execution that lacks any punch. The loot slows down the rarer it is, which actually feels more tedious than it does exciting.

That’s a big box for a little gun, Sergeant.

Battlefield 1’s crates are a prerendered animation followed by a static image of the weapon skin you get. It’s kind of cool the first two or three times, but once that delight wears off it feels more like an afterthought. Snore.

The Power of Choice

Something that’s come up relatively recently is giving players choices in their loot. There isn’t too many examples of this, but I did want to showcase a few games that use this technique. I think it’s a fun, pro-player way to create additional engagement in these sort of random drop systems.

Using the card backs to display rarity and type is a nice twist on a drumroll mechanic.

When you get a ‘Keg’ in Gwent, the fifth card in the pack is one you choose from a set of three. This is a great way to solve an ongoing problem with TCG games, where players rarely have the ability to purchase specific cards ad-hoc.

In Fortnite, at a certain tier of loot, the rarest item in a lootbox will be given to the player as a choice of two equally rare items. This is often between two weapon types, or two new heroes. It’s a nice way to make the loot more meaningful to the player, as they can choose something relevant to them.

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In closing, I’d just like to say that lootboxes, for the most part, are completely evil.

I actually really like microtransactions as a concept. I think it’s a good way for developers to generate ongoing revenue and can be done in a way that doesn’t negatively impact the game, or the playerbase.

I also acknowledge that this concept has existed pretty much since Magic: The Gathering got big. Trading Card Games are almost exclusively built around a random-pack model (although the ability to trade cards mitigates this by creating a secondary market).

Furthermore, I admit that lootboxes when done right can be really fun. I quite like Overwatch’s interpretation — you earn them through standard gameplay, they only contain cosmetics, and you are rarely encouraged to make a purchase. There’s even a recovery mechanic in place so that you can outright purchase items you haven’t been lucky enough to recieve (Although this could be better).

But lootboxes, like booster packs, are gambling. They just are. And it’s a shame that such a large part of the industry (Including our two biggest publishers, EA and Activision Blizzard) are not so deeply entrenched in these systems as a way to sustain their games.

If you’re going to do lootboxes, please, fill them only with cosmetics. Having upgrades that affect gameplay in a randomised system compromises the integrity of your game, and forces players to choose between investing or being at a disadvantage.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to make systems like these work. There’s also a fun way. I don’t think lootboxes are going anywhere, but hopefully they’re going to get better.

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The Things Junior UX Designers Should Do More Of (Not Just Design)

The Things Junior UX Designers Should Do More Of (Not Just Design)

Hardik Gandhi   January 17, 2018

As a designer starting out in the beginning of your career, you may not know what to expect during your first job. You could be given lots of work and because you are the new designer on team, you do things without question. You might think you are expected to know everything because nobody said you should seek out the things you need to help you.

Having worked in the design industry almost every summer in college, I’ve learned a thing or two about how a new designer, such as myself, can navigate through challenges and learn in environments based on implied messages of what we should or shouldn’t do. Knowing the basic tools and techniques of good design is essential, but it’s the small details surrounding how we work which can help us progress and open doors. Here are a few tips that growing designers should take into consideration during their first year on the job to accelerate career growth.

Asking for Help Doesn't Make You Stupid

It’s okay to ask for help, but the issue that some designers may allude to when they say asking for help is a big no-no is the phrasing. Instead of directly asking for help, ask for feedback and advice. If you need help with doing research, join a research session. If you need help with moving forward in a project, ask designers to join you in prioritizing ideas. This will provide you with direction. Instead of receiving a hard-cut answer, you receive validation and perspective, things that will help you develop your own point of view. Designers don’t receive answers, they problem solve to get there.

Saying “No” is better than saying “Yes” all the time*

Note the asterisk. You are in control of what you want to do. You can decide when you reply to that e-mail or if you want to go that meeting. We are often given so many things to do that we can’t do all of them, yet we think we have to. Many designers, especially in the beginning of their career, do everything they are told to do, and this distracts them from the work they need to do the most. Decide on what is most important to help get your work done and prioritize.

Don’t say yes for the things that get in the way of producing quality work.

Delegating tasks and prioritizing is hard, but if you can do that, you will get so much done (and more). It’s okay to say no for valid reasons because it tells people that you know what’s important.

Speak up

During a critique, we are excepted to provide feedback for our peers, but not everyone does it because they might be self concious of their thoughts, or they don’t make the effort to help. Don’t be selfish with ideas. Ideas are meant to be expressed and help our fellow designers design for the people. Feedback is a gift. Feedback is what results in more iterations and better experiences.

Take Breaks

I used to work hard constantly, whether it was at home, with friends and family…You name it. But then I realized, without fault, I will be working for the rest of my life and work isn’t ever really “done”. I was taking the time to work on something fleeting, when I could have been spending time with the people I loved and the things I loved to do outside of work. Also, too much work can increase stress which can increase burnout. It makes sense to do as much work as you can to get to a certain job or rank, but that takes time. Just do what you can and relax when you feel overworked or exausted. In the end, health is more important than work because without health, we can’t work.

Be Present

As tempting as it is to work from home, especially for people who have the privilege of doing so all the time, it is crucial to be present. Even if the quality of work has not been affected, as designers, collaboration is such an important aspect of the way we do things. Being present in the office can make all the difference, especially when working with the people on your team. It’s not a team if everyone isn’t present.

If you have any questions about design, message me on LinkedIn and I’ll write about it!

Links to some other cool reads:

• I interviewed at Facebook as a new grad. Here is what I learned about design
• Standing Up as a Design Leader
• Journey Mapping is the Key to Gaining Empathy
• Prepping for Design Interviews (My Microsoft Onsite Experience)
• UX is Grounded in Rationale, not Design
• The Types of Design Research every Designer should know NOW
• When did Design become so Easy?

How to Lead High-Impact, Cross-Functional Projects

How to Lead High-Impact, Cross-Functional Projects

Hardik Gandhi   January 11, 2018

Even When You’re Not the Boss

This past summer I managed the largest acquisition campaign in my company’s history. I work at HubSpot, a marketing software company that popularized lead-gen campaigns and the whole idea of “inbound marketing,” so this is no small feat (we’ve run massive campaigns over the years).

The campaign, Four Days of Facebook, drove 10x the number of average leads of a typical acquisition campaign and 6x the lifetime value of projected customers.

But I didn’t do it alone. This campaign involved 11 teams and 33 people who directly contributed to the work.

Cross-functional campaigns like this can be big, complicated, and challenging which is why they so often take a boss or recognized leader to make them happen. So I wanted to share my experience as a “non-boss.” I hope it encourages other individual contributors out there to get their co-workers in other departments excited about working on high-impact, cross-functional projects.

Pre-planning: create alignment

You won’t have all the answers on day one, but make sure every conversation you’re having at this stage focuses on one thing: impact. You’ll be asking a lot of people to work hard on something outside of their normal day-to-day, make it clear that your asks will translate into business results.

• Meet with senior leaders of each team before you ask for their employees commitment on helping. Again, make it clear that you won’t be wasting anyone’s time, you’re out to generate big results.
• Have a kickoff meeting with the team who will be responsible for delivering the work. At a high-level, you want to let everyone know that you have senior leadership buy-in and the project will be worth their time. On a more tactical level, you’ll also want to get people up-to-speed on the tools you’ll be using to manage the project.
• Go the extra mile to develop a team culture for your team. You know how developers name their projects crazy-sounding names? It’s surprisingly effective! Give your temporary team a name that makes people feel like they’re a part of something, set up an email alias, and create a Slack channel. Get people excited!

Throughout the pre-planning stage, keep your vision front and center. For Four Days of Facebook we were partnering with Facebook, a fact I repeated constantly.

If people are excited and engaged with your vision, they’ll put up with the inevitable bumps as you achieve lift-off.

During: maintain momentum

The Progress Principle is the idea that humans love the satisfaction of wins, even if they’re small. It’s your best friend as you seek to keep multiple teams and dozens of people aligned and moving in the right direction–constantly show (and celebrate) forward progress.

• Display it: I put together a registration goal waterfall chart that was updated everyday to show progress. It’s motivating to close-in on and cross that goal line.
• Never shut up about it: I linked to information about this campaign in my email signature, Slack rooms, wherever I had the attention of my co-workers. And that information was short, sweet, and up-to-date.
• Be a good partner: You’re not technically the manager of the people on a cross-functional team, but you should implement some management best practices: give people autonomy, figure out how they like to work and what kind of support they need from you.
• Ask for feedback: I asked questions constantly– Is this system or process working for you? Can I set up these reports in an easier way? At one point during this campaign I asked the senior manager of a few folks working on the project if she had thoughts on how I could run it better, she told me she would love to see weekly updates sent to her and other senior managers. I was avoiding this as I didn’t want to clutter inboxes, but it ended up being one of my best tools for building internal momentum around the campaign.

Don’t overlook the fundamentals of good project management. A framework like DARCI makes roles & responsibilities super easy so you the project lead can just say, “This meeting is for people who are Responsible and Accountable only, we’ll be covering deadlines for next week”, or “This meeting is for people that need to be Informed, it’ll be a milestone check-in.”

Find a project management framework, and stick to it.

Wrapping up: close-the-loop

I run 4–5 acquisition campaigns at HubSpot every quarter and running a campaign of this size and impact was a complete rush and I can’t wait to do it again. But before jumping into the next big project, it’s important to do a clean wrap-up, I want people to be excited to work with me and my team again in the future.

• Say thank you: Do it publicly via a company announcement or email, and privately. I wrote handwritten notes to every person who contributed to this campaign.
• Share results soon: Share the quantitative results, but don’t miss Twitter comments from attendees, feedback from partners, or the accolades of your co-workers. This is your chance to make it clear that you promised impact and delivered it.
• Look for improvement opportunities: Because no matter how successful your campaign was, there are opportunities to do better — Were any deadlines missed? Why? Did any team members not work well together? Can this be addressed?

It’s easy to get stuck in a rut of executing one marketing campaign after the next, and it’s scary to think about leading a big cross-functional project that could potentially fail publicly.

But so often the answer to higher impact is better collaboration. Learning how to lead across teams 10x’ed the impact I was having at my company, I hope it does the same for you.

HTTPS explained with carrier pigeons

HTTPS explained with carrier pigeons

Hardik Gandhi   January 11, 2018

Cryptography can be a hard subject to understand. It’s full of mathematical proofs. But unless you are actually developing cryptographic systems, much of that complexity is not necessary to understand what is going on at a high level.

If you opened this article hoping to create the next HTTPS protocol, I’m sorry to say that pigeons won’t be enough. Otherwise, brew some coffee and enjoy the article.

Alice, Bob and … pigeons?

Any activity you do on the Internet (reading this article, buying stuff on Amazon, uploading cat pictures) comes down to sending and receiving messages to and from a server.

This can be a bit abstract so let’s imagine that those messages were delivered by carrier pigeons. I know that this may seem very arbitrary, but trust me HTTPS works the same way, albeit a lot faster.

Also instead of talking about servers, clients and hackers, we will talk about Alice, Bob and Mallory. If this isn’t your first time trying to understand cryptographic concepts you will recognize those names, because they are widely used in technical literature.

A first naive communication

If Alice wants to send a message to Bob, she attaches the message on the carrier pigeon’s leg and sends it to Bob. Bob receives the message, reads it and it’s all is good.

But what if Mallory intercepted Alice’s pigeon in flight and changed the message? Bob would have no way of knowing that the message that was sent by Alice was modified in transit.

This is how HTTP works. Pretty scary right? I wouldn’t send my bank credentials over HTTP and neither should you.

A secret code

Now what if Alice and Bob are very crafty. They agree that they will write their messages using a secret code. They will shift each letter by 3 positions in the alphabet. For example D → A, E → B, F → C. The plain text message “secret message” would be “pbzobq jbppxdb”.

Now if Mallory intercepts the pigeon he won’t be able to change the message into something meaningful nor understand what it says, because he doesn’t know the code. But Bob can simply apply the code in reverse and decrypt the message where A → D, B → E, C → F. The cipher text “pbzobq jbppxdb” would be decrypted back to “secret message”.

Success!

This is called symmetric key cryptography, because if you know how to encrypt a message you also know how to decrypt it.

The code I described above is commonly known as the Caesar cipher. In real life, we use fancier and more complex codes, but the main idea is the same.

How do we decide the key?

Symmetric key cryptography is very secure if no one apart from the sender and receiver know what key was used. In the Caesar cipher, the key is an offset of how many letters we shift each letter by. In our example we used an offset of 3, but could have also used 4 or 12.

The issue is that if Alice and Bob don’t meet before starting to send messages with the pigeon, they would have no way to establish a key securely. If they send the key in the message itself, Mallory would intercept the message and discover the key. This would allow Mallory to then read or change the message as he wishes before and after Alice and Bob start to encrypt their messages.

This is the typical example of a Man in the Middle Attack and the only way to avoid it is to change the encryption system all together.

Pigeons carrying boxes

So Alice and Bob come up with an even better system. When Alice wants to send Bob a message she will follow the procedure below:

• Alice sends a pigeon to Bob without any message.
• Bob sends the pigeon back carrying a box with an open locket, but keeping the key.
• Alice puts the message in the box, closes the locks and sends the box to Bob.
• Bob receives the box, opens it with the key and reads the message.

This way Mallory can’t change the message by intercepting the pigeon, because he doesn’t have the key. The same process is followed when Bob wants to send Alice a message.

Alice and Bob just used what is commonly known as asymmetric key cryptography. It’s called asymmetric, because even if you can encrypt a message (lock the box) you can’t decrypt it (open a closed box).
In technical speech the box is known as the public key and the key to open it is known as the private key.

How do I trust the box?

If you paid attention you may have noticed that we still have a problem. When Bob receives that open box how can he be sure that it came from Alice and that Mallory didn’t intercept the pigeon and changed the box with one he has the key to?

Alice decides that she will sign the box, this way when Bob receives the box he checks the signature and knows that it was Alice who sent the box.

Some of you may be thinking, how would Bob identify Alice’s signature in the first place? Good question. Alice and Bob had this problem too, so they decided that, instead of Alice signing the box, Ted will sign the box.

Who is Ted? Ted is a very famous, well known and trustworthy guy. Ted gave his signature to everyone and everybody trusts that he will only sign boxes for legitimate people.

Ted will only sign an Alice box if he’s sure that the one asking for the signature is Alice. So Mallory cannot get an Alice box signed by Ted on behalf of her as Bob will know that the box is a fraud because Ted only signs boxes for people after verifying their identity.

Ted in technical terms is commonly referred to as a Certification Authority and the browser you are reading this article with comes packaged with the signatures of various Certification Authorities.

So when you connect to a website for the first time you trust its box because you trust Ted and Ted tells you that the box is legitimate.

Boxes are heavy

Alice and Bob now have a reliable system to communicate, but they realize that pigeons carrying boxes are slower than the ones carrying only the message.

They decide that they will use the box method (asymmetric cryptography) only to choose a key to encrypt the message using symmetric cryptography with (remember the Caesar cipher?).

This way they get the best of both worlds. The reliability of asymmetric cryptography and the efficiency of symmetric cryptography.

In the real world there aren’t slow pigeons, but nonetheless encrypting messages using asymmetric cryptography is slower than using symmetric cryptography, so we only use it to exchange the encryption keys.

Now you know how HTTPS works and your coffee should also be ready. Go drink it you deserved it 😉