My father has been obsessed with fossils since he was a boy. Dinosaur bones, dinosaur eggs, trackways, plants–anything that is very old and locked in stone. But it never really clicked with me. I remember when I was young, he would take me out on day trips with other amateur paleontologists. We’d walk around for hours looking for any signs of ancient bones, generally not finding much. It was usually summer and brutally hot. After enough complaining, he stopped bothering to take me along. But he still goes even now, every weekend that he can spare and sometimes longer trips in the summer. He fills his garage with huge slabs of rock, embedded with tiny dead creatures–my mother has long-stopped protesting.

I’ve asked him what he loves so much about this hobby. Like any obsession, there’s a big part of it that he can’t put into words. But then he gets a twinkle in his eyes and describes the eons that have passed since these living things were frozen in time. He imagines the stories, that an animal fell in just the right place to earn millennia of preservation rather than a few months of decay. The timescale seems like one of the main features that attracts him–it’s just so mind-blowing to think that these animals walked the earth hundreds of millions of years ago. The numbers are too big to fathom.

I recently realized that we are the same in this way, only with different subjects. My version revolves around the key spaces of modern cryptography. The bitcoin private key space is 2^256, a number larger than the number of atoms in the known universe.

I cannot get over this–these vast, incredible numbers will always humble me.

I am my father.