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Comment by richthegeek | Hacker News Reader

I'm reading this thread and I still can't figure out the point or how it protects things.

What client would want to add some numbers without knowing what the result is?

I can't imagine any interaction with a database where I don't need to do an operation with the resulting data (even if it's just passing it into a different API/DB unchanged).

My interpretation of your example in human terms is "add your day of birth to your bank balance, but don't tell me the answer" and then walking away. What am I missing?

-- edit --

Maybe I'm looking at it in the wrong direction? Is it more like "here are some numbers that, add them up on your calculator but don't look at the result before showing it to me"?

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The latter is more like it. It is a case where you want something computed, like the sum of your paychecks over the last year, Or some credit card risk evaluation thing, or if you have markers for cancer in your genome data based on your personal information. Instead of sending these values to the server (perhaps encrypting in flight) where they are processed in plaintext (open to malicious intent on the server-side, or honest-but-curious folks who mine your sensitive personal information) the values, you upload remain encrypted so only you know what they mean. However the cloud side can sum them, perform threshold evaluations, search for things, determine fitness for a loan etc, without knowing anything, they go through the motions of the computation for you, but without being able to decipher anything about the computation result at any step along the way. Then when the server-side is done, it has computed whatever you asked it to do, but knows nothing. The server side reliably and deterministically manipulated symbols in a language it cant read. As it turns out, you can, so when the encrypted server-side results are sent back, you decrypt them and understand if you have been approved or have genetic markers for cancer or something.

“This thing I’m handing you is a $10 bill. Also, I have a proof that the serial number on it is real, and not duplicated which I can share (the proof) with any third party, to prove my payment or validate the ledger of payments, without revealing which serial number it is (thereby preserving your privacy).”

That is essentially what zcash is. So as I said, numerous applications in financial crypto (where we can reasonably spend full seconds on desktop, or minutes on secure hardware grinding away at proof to send funds), but not so practical to spend an even greater amount of time on each database query.

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