Comments by "Alexander Sylchuk" (@sshko101) on "The Rise of Japanese Watches (& How the Swiss Lost)" video.

  1. Can mechanical watches be used in cryptography, like unique time delay between two watches? Besides somewhat obvious advantages of such watches like automatic winding, or not having explosive battery in outer space, or being immune to high electromagnetic radiation are there any practical ones of which I am not aware? Why people are still extensively using mechanical clocks in ships, submarines and even nuclear submarines? Recently I've bought myself quartz casio watch and I love it. I was so sick of tapping touchscreen or looking on the phone just to know the time. It probably took me like a week to look at all the watches there are on the internet and to choose the right one. It's so nice that I mostly look on it just to watch it glow nicely and after putting my wrist down I realize that I still don't know the time. Not that I actually want to know it that often, but quite frankly time is digital inside my mind and I still have no clue what do these arrows mean.
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  2. ​ @SianaGearz  I've been watching many videos about mechanical watches lately and one thing was bogging me. It seems like pure waste of money unless it gives you some unique extremely long private key, or at least good secure feed for random number generation. In such a case any watch collection quickly turns from just a risk of loosing significant ammount of money in a single moment to a source of truly secure cryptography, as if you're your own VISA or something. On that same note youtube recommended me one watch factory tour. It was some russian watch manufacturer and I always wondered who are those people who find those watches OK. Funny enough 65% of their business was government orders from ministry of defense. Their main product is mechanical ship clocks and they put it in all the vessels including submarines and nuclear submarines. At that moment I was like "no way, it ought to be for some secret missile coordinates or I am just missing something". I imagine a scenario where nuclear submarine crew realises that their reactor is down, all the diesel backup generators are also down - so they blow up torches look at the time on their mechanical clocks and commander says: "Oh, it's five past nine let's have some tea break. Skipper, send emergency messenger penguin with the SOS message for our rescue". Poor penguin will find it hard to convince everyone that he is actually a messenger penguin and is not affiliated with Linux. Pigeons are just too unorganised to serve on U-boats.
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