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- Watch Hal Finney's 1998 Talk on ZK-proofs.
Watch Hal Finney's 1998 Talk on ZK-proofs.
A nostalgic moment for blockchain enthusiasts.
matt kim
September 21, 2023
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Missed out? Read Past Editions Now
An old 1998 video of Hal Finney discussing ZK-proofs theory has surfaced on the “web3“ internet.
ZK-proof systems first appeared in a 1985 whitepaper.
Assumed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the Bitcoin creator, Hal Finney is discussing the idea of performing zero-knowledge proof on a SHA-1 hash to be inefficient and impractical.
Watching this video feels like being in a time capsule and how today’s blockchain technology was just a theory 2-3 decades ago.
Hal Finney, then, goes on to introduce 2 theories:
1) Zero Knowledge “Arguments”, where the prover's privacy is protected unconditionally
2) Zero Knowledge “Proofs”, where the prover is unconditionally bound
These are more efficient and practical, according to him.
Back to 2023
Since then, more work has been done on these lines.
Currently, there are 2 popular zk-proof technologies:
1) zkVMs (zero-knowledge virtual machines)
2) SNARKs (Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge).
They both allow participants to prove that their transactions are legitimate without revealing certain details of the transactions.
They are both scalable and offer privacy benefits.
However, according to a16z research partner, Justin Thaler, existing SNARK technology can be improved significantly.
“Current SNARK implementations are sufficiently complicated, they’re almost certainly full of bugs, which could make them useless security-wise,” Thaler said.
“We’re talking 10s, 1000s of lines of code, very difficult to understand, and it’s very, very hard to imagine there is not a single bug in these code bases.”
Our takeaway
Technologies can take decades to realize.
It’s good to remember how far we’ve come since the introduction of zk-proofs in 1985.
Hopefully, in the near future, the idea of a decentralized economy with 100% privacy of transactions will be possible.
If you’re not sure why decentralization and privacy are important, check this.
What a time to be in this industry!
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