A Friendly Introduction to Zero Knowledge Proofs
Explore the magic of ZKPs: what they are, why you should care, how they work, and where we can use them.
For anyone curious about this new tech and want to grok it better. No math or code required.
New idea: sleep hotels.
A place you can pay money for to stay over night, kind of like a hotel or airbnb, except they take sleep experience seriously (noise, light, temperature, bed quality, noise).
Cryptowars 2.0 is here.
Here's the core Zero Knowledge circuit (that enables private transactions and fungibility just like in cash) and contract for Tornado Cash.
Maybe someone should put this on a tshirt?
Vipassana meditation is pretty cool, and props to anyone who does it regularly. But how many people have done a retreat and *not* posted about it on social media? Does this give any special insight into the true nature of reality?
Some replies seem to think it is just a matter of picking 5* hotels/chains. These are people who clearly haven’t travelled enough to different places.
The goal isn’t to get some good sleep some of the time but to get great sleep consistently.
Reminds me of people not believing
I'd love if hotels would switch 100% to Whatsapp / chat apps and remove phones from the hotel room
Always have to disconnect the phone to avoid getting waken up by random 8am calls with "sorry today we have maintenance" okay thx 😴
Modernity is great in most ways, but it also comes with many bad habits. Sedentary lifestyle and lack of physical demands is one, another is using screens/working late. There are many others.
The divide is between people who realize this and people who don’t is quite big. This
🏋️♀️ Men who do regular strength training only lose about 15% of their strength when they’re 80 years old vs. when they were 20
👴 Men who do not do strength training lose 60% of their strength at age 80!
Via
@NapierHolland
I was wondering why the
@zcash
Wikipedia page seemed so out of date, so I had a look at the talk page.
Turns out there was a great revision made 3 years ago that was reverted due to not being from "reliable sources":
Who is building a better Wikipedia?
After finding out about 8 people testing positive at
@EthCC_
and with recent cold/flu symptoms (no fever), I called Taiwan CDC about getting tested. It escalated quickly and I was judged high enough risk to be quarantined in hospital for a few days. Test results pending.
Next week at ProgCrypto in Istanbul I'll speak about making client-side proving on mobile simple.
I'll introduce a new tool I've been working on recently, mopro:
Come check it out! Thursday the 16th 15:30 at
#ProgCrypto
#Devconnect
In Taiwan there's a trick for interpreting info from China. If they say not X, it is definitely X. For example, if they say no human-to-human transmission, there is human-to-human transmission. If they say there's no problem, there is a problem. If they say there are no cases...
1/ Today is my last day working at
@vacp2p
@waku_org
and
@ethstatus
. I've been doing this for the last 5-6y and it has been amazing in many ways.
Life is short, and now it is time for me to do something else. I'm looking forward to doing more hacking and working on other things.
Happy to announce the first Zero Knowledge Taipei meetup!
Next Tuesday 26th 18:30.
We have two exciting speakers:
1)
@cryptodavidw
will speak about how to ZK in this day and age
2)
@drCathieSo_eth
will speak about the true essence of ZKML
Event link:
TIL
@github
deletes all issues and PRs if a user gets suspended.
This can happen very randomly, and in addition to engineer below it also happened to GitHub (now Microsoft) cofounder
@defunkt
earlier in this.
This is insanity, and also a huge security risk. We can’t trust Big
Does anyone know someone at
@github
?
One of our engineers got their account suspended for an unknown reason. It removed all outstanding PRs and issues which create a considerable setback for the team.
Simply looking for the reason for the ban as a starting point 🙏
At
#Devconnect
and want to learn about folding in ZK?
Tomorrow morning 0930-1200
@xyz_pierre
@arnaucube
@CPerezz19
and me are holding an improvised Nova, etc folding workshop at the Devconnect coworking space.
Join us at 3Β/30 - U Shape.
Fold or be folded.
@levelsio
Cash (including electronic cash) is a fundamental requirement to an open society.
The alternative is a suppressive surveillance economy that limits people’s economic self determination and freedom.
This is a great article:
New research update for
@vacp2p
Exploring the use of zkSNARKs as a privacy-preserving spam prevention mechanism in open p2p networks. Read on to find out what this might look like, and what the current blockers are!
@michael_nielsen
Similar historical examples:
- Dante's Inferno was written in vernacular (Italian), not Latin
- Dream of the Red Chamber 紅樓夢 was written in vernacular (白話, modern Chinese), not 文言文 classical Chinese
@paulg
's essay comes to mind:
> Prestige is just fossilized
CLIENT SIDE PROVING: How big can circuits for mobile proving be?
With Anon-Aadhaar v1 circuits being 1.7m constraints (and many ZK Identity projects ~1m), we wanted to answer this question with Project MoPerf.
While there are many performance related concerns (memory, prover
Hot take: Impressive ZK teams doing zero-sum sandbox fighting is a bad look for everyone, especially teams involved. I don’t care “who started it”.
Transcend. Move forward. The problem is bigger than any individual solution. Myopic attitude.
I’m excited about both. Whatever
✈️ My year in travels
14 countries, split between Asia and Europe. 3-4 months travel total.
First time in 🇲🇾 Malaysia (🤿 scuba diving), 🏴 Wales (📚book town), 🇮🇪Ireland, 🏴 Scotland, 🇲🇪 Montenegro (🏴☠️ Zuzalu).
🌐 My year in travels
This year I visited 🇧🇷Brazil and 🇱🇦 Laos for the first time
And lived in 4 diff continents: 🇪🇺 Europe (Portugal, Spain and UK), 🕌 Middle East (stayed in Qatar for a bit), ⛩️ Asia for half the year (mostly Thailand and Bali) and 💃 Latin America to visit
Noise pollution: The sound of a car horn should be as loud inside the car as it is outside.
See how often cars would honk loudly for minor annoyances then. Symmetry.
@levelsio
The only reason pepperoni exists is because Americans can’t pronounce foreign words, and when they try it turns into something like “americano” “latte” (milk).
@levelsio
This says more about your followers than anything else.
Olympic weightlifting is a sport. In it dropping weight is the safe and normal way to do it.
Bench bros scared of the sound of barbells is like framework bros being scared of files. Don’t know where they coming from.
Check out this video and write-up to learn more about
@vacp2p
's Waku v2, how it is being used and how it can be useful for messaging in Ethereum :)
Talk at
@coscup
in Chinese (English and Chinese subtitles):
Write-up:
At
@ethstatus
we use bounties () to pay for open source contributions. I made a video where I show how personally I hunt for and create bounties. It's mostly useful for core contributors but thought I'd share it here too.
Snapshot from ZK Residency in Vietnam:
@CPerezz19
from
@PrivacyScaling
talking about ZK-EVM and hacking the Halo2 API with a CellManager to do everything everywhere all at once.
Facebook: leaks 500 million phone numbers, including from 8y old unused accounts
Uniswap: airdrops 500m USD (now worth way more) in tokens to every person who ever used the app
🤔
I’m 98% sure this is a scam. We’ve had no interaction with this project. Their GH is also largely empty except for some forked repos.
While it is an honor to have Vac be used as a form of social proof, this illustrates how easy it is to game the system.
New
@vacp2p
research update on Waku v2, a messaging protocol on top of libp2p.
Find out how its specs are structured, what the implementation status is, our recent testnet, a browser PoC, what's coming up next, and more!
The merge feels magical in a way. It is the culmination of a lot of hard work by people from all over the world, dozens of independent teams, building on cutting edge computer science for many years, and doing it all in the open. And to top it of there’s billions at stake.
If you ever wanted to come to East Asia I highly recommend coming to ETHTaipei, technical no BS event.
Taiwan got one of the best ZK communities in Asia (see ZK Taipei events). They are looking for sponsors too if you are with a bigger project :)
PS There are more events
Happy New Year our boba friends! 🎉
We can finally say that ETHTaipei🧋🧋 is coming this year March 21-24!
We're thrilled to kick off the speaker and sponsor application. Present your latest research and fun stuff and join the discussion with like-minded BUIDLERs! Link👉
ZK Day was a great success. Thanks everyone! This was probably the biggest ZK event we’ve had in Taiwan (so far)
Also shoutout to
@moven0831
and
@nooma4286
for all their hard work with event logistics. Recordings coming soon.
Also spotting some
@daimo_eth
usage in the wild...
ZK Day was a great success. Thanks to all our speakers and people who showed up!
Talks from Nam (MPC), Soowon (Lookups),
@oskarth
& Vivian (mopro),
@danisharora099
(Waku RLN),
@cryptodavidw
(ZK Security)
@ChihChengLiang
, as well as many demos from our ZK Hacker House.
Customer support is almost universally terrible.
- get stuck in a machine/form loop
- random bureaucratic BS
- don't even have email
- lack basic reading comprehension
I'd pay a lot to get excellent customer support, i.e. a human that can actually read, think and act.
We are hiring at
@vacp2p
@ethstatus
!
Protocol Researcher:
Protocol Integration Engineer:
Distributed Systems Engineer:
Wallet & Dapp Integration Developer:
All roles 100% remote.
New research update - Vac as a modular p2p messaging stack for secure messaging.
Read on to find out:
- what this means
- more about the protocol stack
- priorities and open problems
Two and a Half ZK: pocket-aadhaar & pocket-kimchi
Bringing ZKPs to your pocket: fast, secure and accessible. ZK-Identity for 1B+ users; accidentally adding Kimchi proof system to mobile woot woot.
@__zkhack__
submission together with
@yanis_mezn
:
Here's what we are doing at
@vacp2p
:
1) We forked Whisper to Waku to fix obvious problems:
-
-
- Go/Nim client
2) Now we are working on Waku v2 on top of libp2p (WIP):
Heads up, we are ripping out Whisper from the go-ethereum code base. Will move it into its own repo and archive it for posterity, add some links to current work done by
@ethstatus
. All in all SHH died a long time ago and there's no point to tiptoe around it.
#Ethereum
DEVSAKURA 櫻花開發 2024
A set of technical web3 events. By builders, for builders.
Early Spring 2024, East Asia.
There's a strong R&D community in East Asia, but it isn't always visible. Spring is a great time to visit :)
Want to organize an event? DM.
@levelsio
@marckohlbrugge
I completely agree, Pieter. Sometimes you need people with different opinions and perspectives to make a conversation more interesting. Thank you for sharing this thought provoking idea with me.
Next week at ProgCrypto in Istanbul I'll speak about making client-side proving on mobile simple.
I'll introduce a new tool I've been working on recently, mopro:
Come check it out! Thursday the 16th 15:30 at
#ProgCrypto
#Devconnect
.
@normonics
@yaneerbaryam
and
@nntaleb
vs WHO on systemic risk and the need for early travel restrictions, with a case study on Taiwan. Guess who got it right? Lets hold our institutions accountable.
@EthCC_
Another happy hour attendee, Gnosis staffer Marco has been positively diagnosed with
#COVID2019
/
#Coronavirus
. At this point, it's unclear if Marco was infected before, during, or after
#EthCC
.
Please follow guidelines for self-quarantine and testing in your area.
@EthCC_
Next week I'm speaking about mopro, mobile proving made easy, at zkSummit in Athens. See you there!
Mopro is a toolkit for ZK app dev:
If anyone is in Athens this week and wants to chat, hit me up!
Next Friday afternoon at
#ProgCrypto
#Devconnect
there will be a Nova/Folding session with many great talks introducing the latest & greatest in folding.
Fold or be folded!
Don't know anything about folding? ->
TLSNotary enables privacy-preserving data provenance and portability. It helps people free their data from silos and use it as they see fit, enhancing composability on the web.
Read the blog post to by
@sinu_eth
learn more!
If you care about crypto and privacy, this conversation between
@zooko
and
@VitalikButerin
is a must.
- Nuanced convo about a complex topic
- Good faith discussion (more of this!)
- Will be very interesting to look back at this conversation in 5y
All cryptographic claims are programmable. ZKP2P allows for trust-minimized on-ramp to crypto w/o KYC in <2m.
Permission-less innovation. Expect more of this. Program or be programmed ;)
I'm giving two talks at Devcon Bogota:
1) Tomorrow Wed 11am I'm giving a talk on building privacy protecting infrastructure
2) Thursday afternoon: Using ZKP for better p2p messaging with Waku
Come check them out!
#DevconVI
Doing some background reading on the 1918 Influenza, many things appear to be the same today.
The flu comes around every year, and pandemics occur roughly every generation for the last few hundred years. This one impacted ~1/3 of the population with ~50m killed (10%+).
(cont)
Back in 2018 we did our own version of this with Status Principles:
Always pleasant to see so much overlap and resonance across cypherpunk and internet freedom ideals whenever people put them down on paper :)
31 years ago the Cypherpunk manifesto was published. I wrote this manifesto with great concern that we are losing the principles that brought us here. This is an attempt to reunite. To refocus on what is really important. Let's get back to the roots.
Apparently babies develop an accent in the first week of their lives, and you can tell French and German baby cries apart just by looking at the sound waves.
Interesting to see how this plays out if it continues, especially with the COVID lockdown blueprint that has been developed over the last year in many countries. Supply shocks no joke.
“Every society is three meals away from chaos” - Lenin.
The whole point of a value proposition like "censorship-resistance" is to be resistant to censorship. It isn't a buzzword.
If the Web3/Ethereum ecosystem wants to stay relevant and not be proven wrong by Bitcoiners et al this has to be understood. Especially as things heat up.
Brief project update: Waku 0.2 spec out!
Better ABNF grammar, more details on mailserver and handshake, experimental topic-interesting, rate limits and accounting for resources, security considerations, implementation matrix, diff vs Whisper v6 and more.
Use cash.
The more people succumb to the convenience of plastic (permissioned, controlled and surveilled) the higher the risk society goes towards CCP-style social credit scores.
Be part of the intolerant minority that reject this development.
Cryptowars 2.0 is here.
Here's the core Zero Knowledge circuit (that enables private transactions and fungibility just like in cash) and contract for Tornado Cash.
Maybe someone should put this on a tshirt?