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A ctrl-f on the article did not find compression. Can you explain how zero knowledge proofs are going to help compression?

• openfuture 5y ago
  Do you think cryptographic hash functions are a means to compression? Zkps are just hashes that can hash the execution of code rather than hashing static data ("dynamic hashes"?)
  • maayank 5y ago
    > Zkps are just hashes that can hash the execution of code rather than hashing static data ("dynamic hashes"?) That's actually a great intuitive explanation. I'm stealing that.
  • rocqua 5y ago
    > Do you think cryptographic hash functions are a means to compression? No. I think I am missing some core idea here. All I can come up with is a backing store of files (or blocks of files) indexed by hash. Then you can store the hash (or chain of hashes if working with blocks) to represent the file. I wouldn't call that compression though, because you still need the underlying backing store. It could lead to something like compression if you have lots of duplicate blocks. Something like tarsnap uses for efficiently keeping incremental backups. But, compression wise, just handling repeating blocks is rather rudimentary. I guess the above idea isn't what you had in mind though.
  • Ar-Curunir 5y ago
    Not all zero knowledge proofs offer compression, or small proof sizes. You can have linear sized proofs with useful properties, eg, zero knowledge. Indeed, the first ZKPs weren't concerned with succinctness at all.
  • baby 5y ago
    > hashes that can hash the execution of code rather than hashing static data That’s an interesting way to put it!
• delaaxe 5y ago
  If it's sufficient to store a proof that you own a large dataset instead of the dataset itself, that obviously takes less space
  • foxes 5y ago
    How can you prove something about what happens in the real world with some computer program? Okay we run some hash once and then I go chuck the hard drive in a smelter.
    • snovv_crash 5y ago
      They can tell you to do the same thing again, but starting with a different "random seed"
  • craftinator 5y ago
    > that obviously takes less space Not necessarily =)
  • remram 5y ago
    That's not compression if you can't use the dataset. All you compressed is the proof.
• baby 5y ago
  You’re most likely referring to recursive zero knowledge proofs or zero knowledge proof composition, where a proof can verify proofs that can verify proofs. Which I don’t explain here unfortunately :)