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Comment by missing-acumen | Hacker News Reader

While it certainly does not solve everything, the work being done with verifiable VMs is very interesting.

Today's most advanced projects are able to compile pretty much arbitrary rust code into provable RISC-V programs (using SNARKs).

Imo that solves a good chunk of the problem of proving to software users that what they get is what they asked for.

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There's a lot of good cryptography and game theory and economic incentive alignment that can be done to constrain and limit the trust assumptions people have to make. But ultimately, all this does is redistribute and dilute those trust assumptions. It doesn't eliminate them. There is no such thing as "trustlessness".

I do think there is. For instance, I can convince you that two graphs are not isomorphic while avoiding you the burden of having to do the computation yourself.

TIL

> … zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge (zkSNARK), which is a type of zero-knowledge proof system with short proofs and fast verification times. [1]

[1] Microsoft Spartan: High-speed zkSNARKs without trusted setup https://github.com/microsoft/Spartan

> Today's most advanced projects are able to compile pretty much arbitrary rust code into provable RISC-V programs

Provable does not imply secure.

Care to expand? Happy to answer your point which is interesting but I'm unsure of the dimension you are thinking of.

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