Hacker News Reader

Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Nope, no blockchain involved.

To say this has nothing to do with blockchain is like saying RADAR had nothing to do with war. Yes, people knew Maxwell's equations prior, i.e. "knew the proofs," w.r.t. ZKP but it has only really been developed much later, during the war.

The whole field of zero-knowledge mathematics was, if not non-existent, but certainly marginalised, before the crypto investment has hit the scene; this is facts. Yes, Shamir et al. go back to 90s, but it's a far-cry from zkSNARK, zkVM stuff we have nowadays. It has also popularized many applications, like provable auctions (see kyber[1] library in Go as nice starting point...) and opened the door to homomorphic stuff.

[1] https://pkg.go.dev/go.dedis.ch/kyber/v4/shuffle

The comment didn't say that ZKP had nothing to do with blockchain. The comment said that blockchains are not needed/involved for a zero knowledge proof, just like war is not needed for radar.

Actually I meant blockchain qua blockchain, that is, ledger and consensus. There is no ledger and consensus at all in this system.

If people want to redefine blockchain to mean zero-knowledge, and they want to redefine zero-knowledge to mean succinct as they all seem to have done, it's not my problem.

There is no blockchain here, period.

That’s not accurate; all the industrial interest in ZKPs came from academic research. Yes, after the initial deployments the blockchain folks invested a shit-ton of money and greatly accelerated the available implementations (along with also contributing some new schemes), but it’s not like academic research was in some kind of stone-age beforehand.

Web3 is just crypto brought to it's logical conclusion.

That doesn't mean that part of the tech can't be used in traditional IT.

Web3 specifically is trying to repeat the dot-com bubble by using the same technology and content delivery system that it used and which led to the runaway adoption, but in a setting where it makes it too easy to separate people from their money.

I have the impression, that part of the hype cycle is already over.

ZKP can be thought of as a "fancy hash function". It's often puffed up to a mysterious magic level in order to appeal to blockchain audiences, but there's really no magic.

Oversimplification is not helpful either. ZKPs are not glorified hashes. There’s much more mathematics that goes into design of efficient ZKPs and their security proofs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com