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by gerbler
1319 days ago
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>Aztec is on the cutting edge of zero-knowledge SNARK development. Built on PLONK — the paradigm-defining universal zk-SNARK used by leading zero-knowledge projects like Mina, Dusk, Zcash, and zkSync. I have an open mind about this area and a technical background. I really struggle to understand what any of this means and what I can use it for. My experience with cryptocurrency (paying for things) has been challenging. As the whole ecosystem is very fragmented it's hard to know what to explore. |
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It's fairly cutting edge cryptography. It is very fragmented as the industry is rapidly evolving. If I may recommend, a good article on zk Snarks from Vitalik: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/01/26/snarks.html
ZK proofs allow you to prove you know the answer to something without revealing the answer itself. You may not need to know how these things work at a low level. If you're interested, feel free to dig into zk proofs and the cryptography behind them. The subject is quite deep and rapidly evolving. Ultimately, the important thing to know at a high level is that you can post a zk proof with just a few bytes of data, and that zk proofs, while computationally expensive to generate, are computationally cheap to verify. So they are being used as a blockchain scaling technology, since data storage is expensive on blockchains.
If you're just interested in crypto as a user, I would generally recommend getting a Metamask wallet and interacting with some applications like Uniswap, Aave, or OpenSea.