They’re going to change the world, not just for privacy, but for compression.
Well, wiser were wiser means "I build another ZKP". The map colouring explanation was actually more confusing than helpful, as anybody who has attempted to colour a map with just three colours knows you often have the entire thing coloured in, except for one problematic vertex which may be one vertex among billions. If you reveal 20 vertexes at random out of a billion, the odds of finding the proof the problem wasn't solved is worse 1 in 10e5, which isn't a proof of anything.
Your page revealed there are lots of ingredients needed to make ZKP's work. Mapping the problem proving some knowledge about a function being the first step, and one you would never guess from the simplistic descriptions. But by far the most surprising one to me is they (or at least ZK-SNARK's) use homomorphic operations. Homomorphic operations are often in the news (most recently a toolkit from Google), but are so slow (from what I can see about 10e9 times slower than doing the same thing without homomorphic operations) I couldn't imagine a real world use case. But here, right under my nose, are homomorphic operations being used in the real world. And no general purpose toolkits were needed.
Zkps are just hashes that can hash the execution of code rather than hashing static data ("dynamic hashes"?)
Often ZKP can be used to prove those steps were correctly followed.
IE compute F(x,y,z) where I have x, you have y, and dang has z, and none of us want each other to know what our values are.
One possibility I'm excited about is users being able to perform computations locally without sending their data anywhere, and then providing the results to a company, government, etc with a proof that the results are faithful.
(1) This is my credit score, certified by XYZ agency, so please don't ask for my SSN so that you can lose it in a public database leak tmrw
(2) Here's a bug in your program, please give me the bug bounty and I will tell you the bug (can help stop sketchy bug bounty programs.)
(3) Your Certificate Transparency Provider can prove that, for the latest root, there was no change in your certificate. (This has less to do with privacy and more to do with the succinct verification properties of the latest zkps)
(4) Construct postquantum-secure signatures (eg: the Picnic signature scheme)
Generally, ZKPs provide selective disclosure: I can prove to you that some fact about me or my accounts is true, without revealing to you any other information. The SSN example is one, you could generalize that to taxes, bank statements, Keybase attestations, etc.
I worked with the Brave team to sketch out how the latter could be done in their system. It's 1 of 10 proposals and iirc half are using ZKPs to reduce information given to advertisers.
Not all crypto is "crypto".
That said, this page is implicitly focused on ZK computational proofs for general computations. It's also fairly out of date at this point.
On second thought, whilst that might be colloquially true. It might not meet the actual definition. An extractor might be hard to build.
Every cryptography gives the cryptographer an immediate asymmetrical advantage, and that's necessary given crypto's adversaries.
Said cryptography advantage cannot be wasted by centralizing the social environment where people exchange the tokens
Crypto exchanges are the singular main point of failure and that is true for both centralized and de-centralized exchanges
My prediction is that over time people would simply find a btc dealer and pay them with wire transfer and lie to their bank about the reason of the transfer
Same thing with Paypal, credit cards etc. Every regular business is a potential dark crypto exchanger where a person goes there (either physically or online) and there is a tacit deal that they'd pay money but the business won't provide them any goods or services, they'd send them cryptocurrencies instead.
That's what true decentralization looks like, a global opaque market where each transaction ought to be negotiated individually between 2 parties.
LocalBitcoins.com tried, but people preferred the convenience of exchanges such as coinbase, they'd have to learn the hard way when government cracks down on those.
That's really unstoppable, you can never shut it down
A huge benefit is also that there would not be an notorious and advertised global price which people can point at and become envious about those who bought bitcoin at 0,01$. Those people are the biggest opposition to BTC/crypto. Not the environmentally concened, but those who think they missed the boat and and now want to gang up on crypto to destroy other people's gains and re-establish parity. Many environmentally concerned are just envious people who use the environment as the excuse , but they really can't stand the wealth differential which emerged between themselves who missed the boat and the early adopters.ff
Zcash does, and they are planned to be implemented on Ethereum
(This is not a slight against the maintainers; the space is moving incredibly quickly, so it's difficult to keep updating regularly.)
[0] https://medium.com/swlh/a-zero-knowledge-proof-for-wheres-wa...
I’ve worked on other analogies but every simplification is damning in its own way. One I particularly like:
You want to ask Google for directions to an address in your small town but you don’t want Google to know where you are going or where you live. Instead you ask for a list of directions between every address in your small town. It takes a bit longer to return these results but the it satisfies the conditions.
This isn’t of course how ZKP’s work but directionally captures their computational overhead in a way other examples don’t.
If your concern is trusted setups, those are quickly being phased away by better constructions that are fully transparent.
If you've got some resources that you'd be willing to share, I'd appreciate it.
It compresses the whole history of the blockchain into a proof of less than 21KB using recursive zero knowledge proofs (each block has a proof that the previous proof is valid).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221355016_How_to_Ex...
