Yet, those who opt in do have a different opinion. We got two a decade ago, and then a couple years ago through of FOMO that when we are 45 we'd look back and regret missing the window of having another couple of kids. So we did. I'm 39, have four kids, had to get a bigger car, pay the airline tickets through the nose, spend a lot of time on kids' stuff, and love it. My family is the center of the universe and I'm the happiest and wisest dad alive. Everyone else is childish ;-P

(Father of 4, 39 y.o., non-religious.)

The transportation costs are annoying, but worth it.

(https://chatgpt.com/share/693891af-d608-8002-8b9b-91e984bb13...)

* boring and straightforward syntax and file structure: no syntax sugar, aliases, formatting freedom that humans cherish, but machines are getting confused, no context-specific syntax.

* explicitness: no hidden global state, shortcuts and UB

* basic static types and constraints

* tests optimized for machine evaluation

etc.

https://www.youtube.com/live/2IpZWSWUIVE?si=-LRRbU2mJgL9LiNP...

I wonder where a decent alternative will be lurking in the next few years? Apple is losing some grip, but all others are still worse overall.

The only "problem" Bitcoin poses for economies is for governments to fine-tune their local economies via currency production and related controls. In that sense, we should watch how events unfold in Turkey.

* among major "regular" economies, Turkey has the highest % of people holding crypto (≈20%). Second only to special zones UAE and Singapore (31%, 24%).

* Turkish lira is steadily inflated over the last 30-40 years, well over 10% and recently over 50%.

* Turkey does not have mandate for pricing goods in local currency: you can pay in dollars or euros, along the local lira.

* When you enter Istanbul airport, Every. Single. Gate. is marked with BTCTurk ad, inside and outside - the major crypto exchange in the country.

* Istanbul city market is full of traders who use USDT on Tron.

The experiment of social game "Bitcoin" boils down to this: will the people self-organize the functioning economy with monetary freedom, while the gov loses its grip on it; or will the economy collapse without government's regulation and protective management?

My 23+ year experience in computer science and programming is a zebra of black-or-white moments. For the most time, things are mostly obscure, complicated, dark and daunting. Until suddenly you stumble upon a person who can explain those in simple terms, focus on important bits. You then can put this new knowledge into a well-organized hierarchy in your head and suddenly become wiser and empowered.

"Writing documentation", "talking at conferences", "chatting at a cooler", "writing to a blog" and all the other discussions from twitter to mailing lists - are all about trying to get some ideas and understanding from one head into another, so more people can get elucidated and build further.

And oh my how hard is that. We are lucky to sometimes have enlightenment through great RTFMs.

CShake128 is much better replacement for hmac and sha512 in (zk)proofs, while Kangaroo for things like FDE and massive volumes of data.

Example: Git users do need both corruption protection AND secure authentication. If authentication is not built in, it will have to be built around. Building around is always going to be more costly in the end.

Unfortunately, 20-30 years ago considerations such as "sha1 is shorter + faster" were taken seriously, plus all the crypto that existed back then sucked big time. Remember Snowden scandal in 2013? That, plus Bitcoin and blockchains moving towards mainstream brought about review of TLS, started SHA-3 competition. Many more brains turned to crypto since then and the new era began.

Usually it goes like that: someone made something useful optimised for a specific use-case with certain time (or competence) constraints, within a total lack of decent alternatives. Then people adopt and use it, it becomes the standard. Then people want to do more things with it, and try to build around that thing, or on top of that thing and Frankenstein monsters get born and also become standard.

If you start from scratch you can do a crypto protocol that is both better designed (causes less UX pain and critical bugs) AND performs better on relevant hardware. Also do not forget that performance is easily solved by hardware: Moore's law and then custom hardware extensions are a thing.

Example: Keccak is so much better from the composition perspective, that when used ubiquitously you'd definitely have ubiquitous hardware support. But if everyone continues to use a mishmash of AES and SHA constructions on the pretext of "Keccak" is not as fast, then we'd never move forward. People would continue building over-complicated protocols, bearing subpar performance and keeping the reputation of dark wizardry inaccessible for mere mortals.

If we do not talk about modern exotic stuff (post-quantum crypto, zkSNARKS, homomorphic encryption), the 99% of everyday cryptography is based on two building blocks:

1. Symmetric crypto for ciphers and hash functions.

2. Algebraic group with "hard discrete log problem" for key exchange, signatures, asymmetric encryption and simple zero-knowledge proofs.

Historically, these two categories are filled with a zoo of protocols. E.g. AES is a block cipher, but SHA(1,2) is a hash function.

Today, you can roughly achieve everything of the above with two universal building blocks:

- Keccak for all of symmetric crypto: it is suited both for encryption, hashing, duplex transcripts for ZK protocols etc.

- Ristretto255 group based on Curve 25519: for diffie-hellman, signatures, key derivation, threshold schemes, encryption and more.

The problem is that none of the described features is implemented in a turnkey standard, and we are still stuck using older crypto. Heck, even Git is using SHA-1 still.

Then, after you have your building blocks, there are more hairy stuff such as application-specific protocols: TLS, Signal, PAKE/OPAQUE, proprietary hardware security schemes for full disk encryption and access controls etc.