Ristretto adds complexity over just using secp256k1, which also has very good Rust support, is quite fast and well-optimized, compiles to WASM, and supports ECDSA, ECDH, and Schnorr key aggregation, so it's quite full-featured.
Funny timing that this particular topic made it to HN. From the recently-released Season 4 of The Dragon Prince, this is one of the reasons Claudia is so infatuated with Terry, an Earthblood elf.
If the unit cost is higher than the maximum a manufacturer or retailer can charge, it won't be produced at all. This results in a market failure, similar to the one China's experiencing with their energy market, where the price of coal is 4x what it was earlier this year.
I'm not an economist, but I'm curious about this topic.
If, say, an iPhone cost $20k (because of emissions and slave/inhumane labor), obviously us normal folks (or poor folks) wouldn't own one, but would they still be produced for the grotesquely wealthy among us or would they just be scrapped or would the supply chain optimize for the new cost-structure and stop using slave labor to bring it down to a more reasonable price?
Seems to be trending downward... Who knows if it'll be enough.
I was curious if a similar downward trend existed for solar panels...
"In 1956, solar panels cost roughly $300 per watt. By 1975, that figure had dropped to just over $100 a watt. Today, a solar panel can cost as little as $0.50 a watt."
So, that's a factor of 600 to get to present costs. Gold currently costs $56,500 per kg. So, $33,900,000/kg. So, who knows where we could be in 50-70 years. Plenty of time to switch the entire global economy to Bitcoin, I suppose!
> "Builders still have to clear their inventories of having purchased higher-priced lumber. It takes a while to clear the system," Lee said. "Yes, lumber prices from the mills came down dramatically over the summer, but that's unfortunately taken a while to reach the rest of the industry and consumers."
> Lee said when it comes to new home construction, pricing is being complicated by ongoing pandemic-related supply chain challenges. While difficulties related to lumber have eased, home builders are still dealing with delivery delays and price inflation on everything from plumbing and electrical products to kitchen cabinetry.
> "It doesn't compare to the three to five times price increases we saw with lumber, but I'd say on average, we're seeing 10 per cent increases on everything, including the kitchen sink," Lee said. "And we are still seeing delays on closings, just because of an inability to get products and materials."
Meanwhile... August 27th, 2021:
> "...households, businesses and market participants also believe that current high inflation readings are likely to prove transitory," Powell said.
I believe it. I am actually more worried about a deflationary spiral and an actual depression when the covid punch bowl gets taken away than moon growth for ever.
Things were shitty before covid happened, and many were expecting a recesion in 2020 before covid existed, markets siezed up late q3 19, and needed help then. The world has since been living on vast quantities of high grade heroin dished out all over the world, quite rightly by various central banks.
Only once the covid tide goes out we will see who has been swimming naked.
Why would they US government not be able to print its way out? I assume the US will be able to as long as it has the preeminent military and a stable society and court system, with relatively high levels of trust compared to other countries.
If another similar size country becomes a more stable option, then I would be worried.
Recesssions and depressions cant happen because the US can print money? Tell that to the history books. While you are there take a look at what causes an economic turndown, it tends to come on the back of massive spending, printing money, juiced growth and wars.
Politically, I do not think the US will let a deflationary spiral happen as long as it can print money. Sufficient portions of the population are fully invested in the equities market, and I expect the US to pull out all the stops to prop up their prices. They might take a hit for a couple years (although I bet even that seems politically unacceptable), but on a timeframe of more than a few years, I expect the US government to keep inflating, assuming they are able to per the conditions in my previous comment.
I am not certain they have as much power over inflation as they think. The US have been trying to drive higher inflation since 2008. Japan have been trying to drive higher inflation since 1990's.
Europe have been trying to drive higher inflation since 2014.
Printing money, making money free, paying people to borrow, buying assets, bonds, mortgages even stocks has been attempted. We have gotten to the point of literally putting money into peoples bank account, and finally have an inflation print akin to pre 2008 in the US and Europe.
I'd sadly say the US has (like any empire before it) used wars and similar methods to achieve the opposite. Not always effectively but still.
Check a lot of countries in the world peg to the dollar even when it doesn't seem economically sensible.
Remember when Japan in the 80's was forced to do technology transfers to the US, import minimum quotas of US tech and limit it's exports whilst adjusting their monetary policy to help out the US leading to a crash that preceded the lost decade?
It's not because they loved the US so much that they did such things.
> used wars and similar methods to achieve the opposite
Totally agree - but the bust comes after the war... based on the size of spending, one could make parallels between war and covid policy. A trick old as time to stir up a war to distract from political problems. Borrow and spend is justified (unless you are a traitor and vote to kill our troops). But the flip side of that things are ugly - but it is always the next guys problem.
With so much money readily available for investment, speculation was inevitable, particularly in the Tokyo Stock Exchange and the real estate market. The Nikkei stock index hit its all-time high on December 29, 1989, when it reached an intra-day high of 38,957.44 before closing at 38,915.87. (sounds familiar perhaps?)
The 1990s in Japan was the beginning of economic turmoil and recession for that particular nation; resulting in their Lost Decade.
I believe it. By “transitory”, he doesn’t mean “heading back to 2019 prices”. He means, “no longer inflating at these rates”. Thats almost certainly true.
The “Making Sense” podcast [0] covers the deflation / inflation debate in detail and is a great listen.
Agreed, I wish we'd have gone down that road. How is it more efficient for my signals to go a thousand miles away and back just to talk to my neighbor across the street?
I've often thought, the web isn't designed for efficiency, it's designed for scale. Scale around big tech giants, to concentrate wealth, exploit gray areas, and magnify harm.
I used to love JavaScript, but when I look at what it's become, I'm glad I left it. We weren't doing the world any favors by contributing to a massive body of casual execution of untrusted code.
The web was a mistake, but I think the internet, good old TCP/IP, still has a few tricks up its sleeve for us yet.
> How is it more efficient for my signals to go a thousand miles away and back just to talk to my neighbor across the street?
For that, your neighbor would have to run their own infrastructure, keep it updated, moderated against spam, hackers and whatnotelse. And most people don't have the resources to do that - time, money or a DSL uplink with at least something halfway decent upstream bandwidth.
> I've often thought, the web isn't designed for efficiency, it's designed for scale.
Not intentionally designed. But the economies of scale always win in the end - agriculture, manufacturing, even education. As a conglomerate, the Internet as a sum of actors has always converged to see inefficiencies as damage - and route and work around them.
The argument those points are supporting, as the article explains, this is an ineffective way to fight CP, but it's being done anyway, and can be used for nefarious purposes.
Could a government not have a different level of interest in law enforcement over CP vs, say, political material that undermines government authority?
