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by danbruc 994 days ago
Cryptocurrencies have not actually invented much new technology, they mostly combined existing ideas in new ways. Merkel trees, for example, are an almost 50 year old idea, zero-knowledge proofs are almost 40 years old, proof of work predates Bitcoin by 15 years which makes it 30 years old.
2 comments
iskander 994 days ago
I think the initial impractical prototypes for the core techniques were in the literature for a while but there's really no comparison between eg interactive ZK protocols and the succinct non-interactive proofs used by the cryptocurrency folks. The latter are computationally general (you don't have to roll a new one for each program) and many orders of magnitude more efficient.

I think it's important to give the cryptocurrency industry credit for the few corners in which it makes real (theory/tooling) contributions even if they're motivated by nonsense

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danbruc 994 days ago
I did not want to say that they invented or improved nothing, just that a lot of the building blocks already existed. I just looked this up, non-interactive zero-knowledge proof also seem to have a history back to the late 80s, but if cryptocurrencies gave us some improvements and new ideas that made them more practical, fine, I am not going to complain about that.
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iskander 994 days ago
Like, huge tangible improvements.

You can do general purpose programming in all kinds of DSLs and Rust libraries that compiles down to big-but-practical arithmetic circuits and then generate proofs that y=f(x) without revealing x for arbitrary f. That really wasn't possible until a few years ago and emerged almost exclusively within the sphere of cryptocurrency-adjacent research. You can also use the succinctness of SNARKs to batch these proofs and shrink the verifier costs to almost nothing

It's a cool model for asymmetric computing, with low capacity verifiers collecting results from high capacity provers. It'll probably find uses outside deranged gambling...

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wmf 994 days ago
Recent advances in SNARKs/STARKs/VDFs were funded by crypto. SNARKs have gone from unusably slow to reasonably efficient.
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