Zero knowledge proofs are one of the more promising things starting to emerge from crypto and decentralized blockchain space. If desired, you can still trust Apple for the ZK proof generation and verification without having to store any private details on their servers.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/107.pdf
People in the crypto space are coming from a different angle, they are franctically trying to find a legitimate use for cryptocurrencies, so far unsuccessfully, by constantly rebranding blockchain technologies without being able to address the challenges. It's not that we desire to trust Apple, it's that they get things done. They have actual solutions that work, not just empty promises aimed at greater fools. People in the crypto space never deliver.
Look into modern research around succinct and generalized ZK proofs. SNARKs, STARKs, PLONK, zkVMs, MPC and secure setup ceremonies. All of this is coming from blockchain and crypto space and will transform some ways we manage privacy in the future. It does not need to be used with a blockchain but pairs well as the choices of arithmetic are often optimized to EVM.
“Apple is faster at delivering than a decentralized group of developers and researchers creating novel cryptographic protocols and open source software” - well, no shit.
I generally agree, for almost all uses blockchains are pretty bad.
But it has, so far, been an eventually consistent global write-only data store where reads have 100% uptime. I don't want a service layer on blockchain, don't want to be using the blockchain to transact, but if there's some small modicum of write-once globally-read-many datum (such as oh say, a cryptographic token I can use to sign things to prove my identity) where blockchain actually seems like a good match. The slow and expensive isn't a problem, if all I'm doing is proving an identity I made a long time ago.
I'm not super worried about people verifying me using a bad blockchain. These systems should be self-verifying & diverging for too long should trip systems.
Normally i try to avoid low quality complaint comments like the one i am making, but blockchain naming is frustrating.
Yeah. In every other situation, people try to improve the speed and efficiency of software.
In this case, it’s like people prefer to do bubble sort even if there is quick sort available. And then sell it as the best thing ever invented.