circom

Gubsheep's talk last week wildly changed my perspective on zk-crypto. Basically he frames zk-circuits as an "expressive language for claims". For example, while you can come up with custom crypto schemes for claims like "I know a private key that belongs to Alice's public key", RSA and ECDSA both do this, but using zk-circiuts you can easily make much more complex claims. The example he gives later is "I know a private key corresponding to Alice, Bob or Charlie's public keys, and the other two can (or maybe can't) prove that they did NOT generate this message." So, using these tools, you as a programmer can build up complex cryptographic machinery claiming all sorts of wild things without needing a cryptographer standing over your shoulder. Circom (https://github.com/iden3/circom) has already been used to build several cutting edge privac

I would argue that pretty much all of the recent (past 5 years) advances in work on zkproofs is researched/funded/applied by cryptocurrency community. and imo this is the most important work in cryptography that is happening, actually developing secure general computation. You might not like cryptocurrencies but to dismiss this is silly. The "crypto means cryptography" motto also trivializes all the prior work, cryptography and ideas of digital tokens/currencies have been tied together for decades. https://zkp.science/ https://zkproof.org/ https://github.com/0xPARC https://github.com/iden3/circom