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by whatisweb3 1423 days ago
In the long term I hope Apple does not win. The idea that we should just submit the world’s private data to Apple for the next century is… terrible.

Zero knowledge proofs are one of the more promising things starting to emerge from crypto and decentralized blockchain space. If desired, you can still trust Apple for the ZK proof generation and verification without having to store any private details on their servers.

1 comments

Practical ZK is coming from cryptography, like this decentralized gun registry by the Brown University.

https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/107.pdf

People in the crypto space are coming from a different angle, they are franctically trying to find a legitimate use for cryptocurrencies, so far unsuccessfully, by constantly rebranding blockchain technologies without being able to address the challenges. It's not that we desire to trust Apple, it's that they get things done. They have actual solutions that work, not just empty promises aimed at greater fools. People in the crypto space never deliver.

I don’t see any reference to zero knowledge proof in there.

Look into modern research around succinct and generalized ZK proofs. SNARKs, STARKs, PLONK, zkVMs, MPC and secure setup ceremonies. All of this is coming from blockchain and crypto space and will transform some ways we manage privacy in the future. It does not need to be used with a blockchain but pairs well as the choices of arithmetic are often optimized to EVM.

“Apple is faster at delivering than a decentralized group of developers and researchers creating novel cryptographic protocols and open source software” - well, no shit.