SNARKs and their Practical Applications
summary
A working decentralized anonymous payment system called Zerocash uses zk-SNARKs to hide sender, recipient and amounts while preserving double-spend checks; it produces proofs <300 bytes, verifies in a few milliseconds and currently generates proofs in under a minute (about 47s on a desktop) using pairing-based crypto, SHA-256 and knowledge-of-exponent style assumptions. The implementation replays Bitcoin-scale transactions on EC2 successfully, requires a trusted setup ~1 GB (ceremony with at least one honest party), and still needs much faster proving and less preprocessing.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:35Bitcoin
- 5:01Numbers
- 7:16Properties
- 9:21Zero Knowledge
- 10:44Delegate Computation
- 11:48Supply Chain
- 12:43Construction
- 16:20C Programs
- 29:03Poor Transaction
- 30:42Simulations
- 31:32Trusted Setup
- 32:08Open Problems
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