Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by polyomino 757 days ago
As far as I’m aware, there’s no way of validating something without observing it. If that’s true, then you will have to trade the ability to validate the entire chain in order to scale on chain, at which point, who cares what’s on chain vs off?
2 comments

> As far as I’m aware, there’s no way of validating something without observing it.

That's where zero knowledge proofs come in. If you know the root hash at state a, and the new root hash at state b is given along with a zk proof, that proof data can quickly prove that the state change from a to b was arrived at correctly. In this case, the benefit of doing this on ethereum (or other evm l1 blockchain) is that those proofs can be validated on chain.

ZKP and FHE let you verify whatever you like. The former leaks data while the latter doesn't.
Can you explain what you mean?