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Comment by jackb4040 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think ZKPs / programmable cryptography are useless like some of the other commenters. But I do remember being surprised, based on the way that people talk about building on top of it, to learn that the performance is so bad (except on dedicated servers) that it's basically a theoretical technology until that's fixed. Has this changed recently? Not a rhetorical question.

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Nowadays you can run arbitrary verified computation at 100-300MHz using so-called zkvm. State of the art are probably risczero and succinct.

Practically speaking, write any program you want, compile it to riscv, imagine to run it on a pretty fast microcontroller, and in addition to the result you get a proof of correct execution.

I’d say it’s pretty practical, all major unlocks happened like in the past 3-4y and of course there’s a ton of research still happening.

This is the slow/generic version. For specific problems (aka dedicated circuits) it can be much faster.

I won't overclaim but look at "Binius" which uses fields, instead of prime orders, of orders of powers of two. The very intuitive notion is that computers are good at 2s, thus explaining their massive performance gains.

There's a big asymmetry where creating a proof is usually dramatically more expensive than verifying it (which is often extremely cheap!). That might be OK for some applications but still rule out other applications.

Aren't several cryptocurrencies built on ZKPs? Their business model aside, ZKPs do look like one of the rare examples of theoretical elegance and real world use (even if not widespread).

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