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Except that ZKPs had already seen real-world use before Satoshi's whitepaper was circulated; in fact, there was an already-defunct startup that was selling ZKP-

Except that ZKPs had already seen real-world use before Satoshi's whitepaper was circulated; in fact, there was an already-defunct startup that was selling ZKP-driven authentication tech. Secure multiparty computation is even more advanced than ZKPs, was already deployed in several real-world applications prior to Bitcoin, and has probably driven more research on ZKPs (as a building block in MPC protocols) than anything in the blockchain space thus far. As for how widely productionized the technology is, while I am not sure how you define "non-trivial" ZKPs, U2F was almost certainly a more widely used ZKP application than any blockchain tech, and there are plenty more real-world ZKP applications having nothing to do with blockchains that we could list. David Chaum dreamed about a world where electronic payments could be anonymous and secure, but the demand was not there and his startup never took off. "Blockchain" sucked most of the oxygen out of the room when it comes to further work on ecash, which is unfortunate given that even the most technically complex ecash proposals were overwhelmingly more efficient than any blockchain-based payment tech ever could be. For what it's worth, the most recent ecash proposals also advanced the research on NIZKs and ZKPs more generally (it is actually hard to avoid some kind of NIZK in a system that supports offline payments) and had ecash been deployed more widely we probably would have seen at least as much research and productionization activity as we see in the blockchain space. On the other hand, blockchain research has struggled with a foundational question that does not present a problem for any of the technology I mentioned above: how to properly define security. Especially in the permissionless setting the effort on defining security has been unconvincing so far, requiring a very stretched approach to formalizing computational resources that is hard to actually map onto a real-world application. Satoshi did not start with a well-defined problem he was trying to solve with Bitcoin, and such an approach -- clearly identifying the problem you are actually trying to solve and verifying that the definition is logically consistent and realistic -- is exceedingly rare in the blockchain space, while in mainstream cryptography research it is a de facto requirement. So while blockchain tech has not experienced a spectacular failure due to some theoretical shortcomings, the theory itself is not well developed compared to the theory of cryptography in general (including ecash, which can be rigorously defined and proposed systems can be proved to satisfy the definition).

Ar-Curunir 5y ago
Zerocash is an crash system in the vein of Amon Ta-Shma’s variant from 99, and has rigorous security definitions and proofs. Follow-up work like Zexe strengthens these definitions to standard ones used in MPC, namely simulation-based security. Furthermore, the MPC deployments you speak of are rather small-scale, there have been no deployments of general-purpose MPC beyond maybe the sugar beets auction.
- betterunix2 5y ago
  MPC has been deployed at large scale by numerous companies, at least for the ads industry; I know because I actually work on exactly this full time and I have seen the numbers (but unfortunately I cannot share specifics). There is nothing special about general-purpose protocols that makes them more "legitimate" or whatever; we use specialized protocols in practice because it is almost always more efficient and thus less expensive to run (and MPC is usually right on the threshold of being too expensive). As for zerocash, the last time I looked into it what I saw were a set of security definitions that assume a reliable ledger of some kind; whether or not that ledger is implemented using a blockchain at all is not addressed in the theoretical work. The practical deployment relied on Bitcoin, but since Bitcoin security is not well-defined (or at least not convincingly defined) that makes the rest of the security argument dubious. As far as I know Zexe has the same problem: yes, the security definition is much stronger, but they do not address the realization of the ledger functionality itself and thus any real-world deployment that relies on e.g. Bitcoin, or really any permissionless blockchain, has the same theoretical shortcomings. Ultimately the permissionless setting itself is the problem; zerocoin could be implemented using a ledger managed by a trusted party, and it would achieve its security goals without those theoretical problems. I should also be clear that when I say ecash does not share this problem, it is because ecash has a well-defined security model and all functionalities needed to realize an ecash system also have well-defined security. We can instantiate ecash using any of the security assumptions we commonly use for digital signatures, and in theory ecash can be instantiated from MPC (by using a generic MPC protocol to implement a blind signature, then using the blind signature to implement ecash), which itself can be instantiated with standard cryptographic assumptions. So ecash has a security definition that is as well-defined as a cryptographic security definition can be.

Ar-Curunir 5y ago

Zerocash is an crash system in the vein of Amon Ta-Shma’s variant from 99, and has rigorous security definitions and proofs. Follow-up work like Zexe strengthens these definitions to standard ones used in MPC, namely simulation-based security. Furthermore, the MPC deployments you speak of are rather small-scale, there have been no deployments of general-purpose MPC beyond maybe the sugar beets auction.

betterunix2 5y ago
MPC has been deployed at large scale by numerous companies, at least for the ads industry; I know because I actually work on exactly this full time and I have seen the numbers (but unfortunately I cannot share specifics). There is nothing special about general-purpose protocols that makes them more "legitimate" or whatever; we use specialized protocols in practice because it is almost always more efficient and thus less expensive to run (and MPC is usually right on the threshold of being too expensive). As for zerocash, the last time I looked into it what I saw were a set of security definitions that assume a reliable ledger of some kind; whether or not that ledger is implemented using a blockchain at all is not addressed in the theoretical work. The practical deployment relied on Bitcoin, but since Bitcoin security is not well-defined (or at least not convincingly defined) that makes the rest of the security argument dubious. As far as I know Zexe has the same problem: yes, the security definition is much stronger, but they do not address the realization of the ledger functionality itself and thus any real-world deployment that relies on e.g. Bitcoin, or really any permissionless blockchain, has the same theoretical shortcomings. Ultimately the permissionless setting itself is the problem; zerocoin could be implemented using a ledger managed by a trusted party, and it would achieve its security goals without those theoretical problems. I should also be clear that when I say ecash does not share this problem, it is because ecash has a well-defined security model and all functionalities needed to realize an ecash system also have well-defined security. We can instantiate ecash using any of the security assumptions we commonly use for digital signatures, and in theory ecash can be instantiated from MPC (by using a generic MPC protocol to implement a blind signature, then using the blind signature to implement ecash), which itself can be instantiated with standard cryptographic assumptions. So ecash has a security definition that is as well-defined as a cryptographic security definition can be.