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I just wanted to say a big thank you for that page. I've read a few explanations of ZKP's, of the Ali Baba map type and now this map colouring explanation, an
by rstuart4133 5y ago
I just wanted to say a big thank you for that page. I've read a few explanations of ZKP's, of the
Ali Baba map type and now this map colouring explanation, and I came away none the wiser.
Well, wiser were wiser means "I build another ZKP". The map colouring explanation was actually more confusing than helpful, as anybody who has attempted to colour a map with just three colours knows you often have the entire thing coloured in, except for one problematic vertex which may be one vertex among billions. If you reveal 20 vertexes at random out of a billion, the odds of finding the proof the problem wasn't solved is worse 1 in 10e5, which isn't a proof of anything.
Your page revealed there are lots of ingredients needed to make ZKP's work. Mapping the problem proving some knowledge about a function being the first step, and one you would never guess from the simplistic descriptions. But by far the most surprising one to me is they (or at least ZK-SNARK's) use homomorphic operations. Homomorphic operations are often in the news (most recently a toolkit from Google), but are so slow (from what I can see about 10e9 times slower than doing the same thing without homomorphic operations) I couldn't imagine a real world use case. But here, right under my nose, are homomorphic operations being used in the real world. And no general purpose toolkits were needed.
- baby 5y agoThey use additive homomorphic functions, not fully homomorphic functions, which is the one you’re talking about. If you only support one type of operation instead of two (+ and x) then it’s pretty straight forward (even RSA was additively homomorphic)