Like many people who have worked in cryptography for decades, and is used to the abbreviation "crypto" to refer to it, I wince when I see that term now being frequently used as a short for "cryptocurrency," ie. Bitcoin and its friends.

It is a strange takeover -- crypto has been around for decades as a term, and cryptography is, by many orders of magnitude, a more widely used and deployed technology. You're using it to read this and you and everybody else online uses it thousands of times a day for a growing fraction of all your online communication and many other things. Cryptoocurrencies, however, are the "hot new thing" and near the peak of the hype cycle. As such, and certainly in some circles, "crypto" now is most likely to mean blockchain tech.

The irony is that cryptocurrencies don't even use encryption. They use digital signature and hashes, which come from the field of cryptography, and thus the name.

However, what's important about them is not that they use crypto. That's just the tool used to attain the real goal -- decentralization.

As such, I think a better name for these coins and technologies would emphasize that. I might suggest the following:

• Decents or DeCents -- money and decentralization
• Decentrals (so that it doesn't sound like the existing words descent or decent)
• Distribs

Of course, I hardly get to declare a new name, and I may be tilting at a windmill here, but this still needs to be declared.