It's definitely worth researching but the cost of implementation might be really high.

The problem is, does *anyone* have any clue, at all.

I keep pattern matching to nuclear fusion in the 80s, which would mean the current panic is ridiculous. But that assessment itself could be ridiculous; I don't know.

I am suspicious generally of advances in fundamental physics, that field went from breakneck speed in say the 1920s to an enormously expensive waste of time by around 2000. Arguable, of course, but still.

I wonder if we could help the general public by explaining why there is such a thing as a "private" member variable in computer programming ... i.e. that it's not a morality question, it's a principal used for architecting systems well, for both safety and efficiency.

I mean obviously not 😁 ... but, in theory, maybe.

But wait you said member. Why not any user?

Yeah. An interesting detail, crossed my mind too!

Unless they switched to El Gamal but I very much doubt it.

Yeah not working atm sorry

An ignored part of the current quantum computer fud^H^H debate, because it's a counterfactual: back in 2015-17 a lot of people got very excited about a proposal from Greg Maxwell to do "confidential transactions" on bitcoin. I was very much in the group of people both fascinated and excited about the prospect and went very deep down the rabbit hole on it, learning a lot about cryptography along the way.

But the energy to even suggest a fork to include it slowly dissipated; my own personal reason for rejecting it was *not* the obvious "the range proofs are too large" (see: Bulletproofs, work that was heavily inspired by that scaling problem, though it ended up being far more significant w.r.t. "folding"). It was "pedersen commitments are only computationally binding" [1], to put it another way an EC break means we get unbounded, invisible inflation. At the time it was fun to predict that Zcash had this failure mode and indeed it was borne out (look up their history if you don't know). It felt weird justifying this to people sometimes: "I don't want a bitcoin where amounts are not visible because the total might not add up" sounds Luddite ... I remember being asked on a panel by Giulia Fanti "are you scared that P=NP or something?" ... it was not felt to be a quite logical thing to worry about this, since we rely on EC in Bitcoin anyway ... and if we trust EC, the math of homomorphic commitments *guarantees* it adds up!

But a computational bound on that is not OK. i.e. i don't want *any* computer to be able to break it! not just normal computers! - and that's exactly where a quantum computer comes in. I am FAR more worried about breaking bitcoin's fixed supply than about a million old P2PK coins getting stolen. Stealing is not minting.


[1] A counterpoint is that ElGamal commitments exist, at the cost of even more space. But hey, it's still less space, by a huge margin, than current post quantum signature schemes! Something worth considering?

#cryptography #bitcoin

Pretty sure it's deliberate. Despite quite a few people (especially users!) complaining about it.

Yeah, I think I saw that text on another page, but definitely good find; because that text is the most explicit about their baffling decision: "no longer considered a good choice" for opening files, only for "Save As". Crazy.

My favorite part of researching this was finding this in an old 2012 thread:

"I will second the default of $HOME.

I, like many people, like to watch pornography on my computer. Lots of pornography. Pornography that pushes the boundaries of what is physically, morally, and socially acceptable. Contemptuous, despicable, regrettable pornography.

I think it would be great if the GtkFileChooser did not try to announce this fact to everyone who uses my computer to save a spreadsheet.

Thanks!" https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=658280#c15

😆

@nevent1qqs...

Linux desktop stuff is such a mystery to me. This honestly seems batshit insane, but in GTK3, it appears that if you use a FilePicker, something like (Rust here but w/e):
rfd::FileDialog::new().set_directory(&my_specific_dir).pick_folder()

... it refuses to open the file picker in your specified directory. It just flat out ignores you, and *always* opens the dialog in its "Recent Items". So not complaining about a default (though it's a terrible one honestly), but the baffling decision to just ignore the developer's setting. I would love to find any justification of this anywhere, but I can't. This "documentation" ( https://docs.gtk.org/gtk3/method.FileChooser.set_current_folder.html ) just points at a non-existent other documentation section to justify why you shouldn't use the function (Not "deprecated" but "warning, you'd better not use this function, but we won't tell you why!"). The code itself basically defaults to recent items, and that can *only* be overwritten with a GTK setting, outside of the developer's control, and here's the best bit: if you somehow get your user to override it, they can *only* change the location the FilePicker opens in, to $HOME! Your directory setting will still get ignored!

Btw this restriction did not exist in the previous GTK version; they actively added it as an improvement.

#linux

That's exactly what Lightning excels at.