Zcash make a significant contro to ZKPs though, what would be the state without their tec?
Did their advancements have any other implications besides cryptocurrency?
Did their advancements have any other implications besides cryptocurrency?
It's a little bit funny to me. I can understand a response of "Hmm, while your application of cryptography may have some legitimate uses, in practice it seems like it's largely used for crime and scams." But I wonder what they thought the primary application of cryptography was going to me! Privacy-preserving technologies that allow you to hide from the government are necessarily going to be useful to criminals. But that's the price of freedom, no?
(I guess to be fair, some cryptographers might be interested in things like privacy-preserving voting, which wouldn't ever be useful to criminals.)
Classic use cases would be like 1) show that you have a national id (like a passport) without revealing which one, 2) show that you are >= 18 without revealing your date of birth. More generally, assuming you have digital credentials with metadata, pretty much any statement can be proved in ZK (relatively efficiently, especially if the digital id is designed to be ZK friendly).