The Aha-Moment of Public-Key Encryption

I started my deep dive into cryptography six months ago. I wanted to deconstruct its internals into basic building blocks and then build them back up again. One simple idea kept pulling me forward—fascinating me and motivating me to go deeper: how can a crowd of absolute strangers—over the internet, an inherently insecure medium—exchange information securely? I won’t lie: I honestly expected to find one simple answer that would “click” and give me an Aha moment. Instead, I fell into a rabbit hole. One idea led to another; one logical structure interacted with—and depended on—another. Math, history, logic, statistics. Topics and disciplines intertwined into a complicated, sophisticated ornament. No final answers—only more questions, theories, experiments, and try-and-fail stories. Stories of absolute trust and absolute failure, of elegant ideas that didn’t work, of intuition that misled, and of randomness that won. Brilliant people built brilliant solutions—some failed, then came new so