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Comment by Ar-Curunir | Hacker News Reader

Open source works well for very complicated pieces of software, except for complicated cryptography; the material used in ZCash was developed in papers as recent as 4 yrs ago. Rest assured that most programmers understand nothing about the underlying SNARKs.

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You are underestimating passionate and very smart people.

I am not underestimating anyone; even within theoretical cryptography, SNARKs are understood by a handful of people.

I am a cofounder of a company in this space and three people in my company are in a position to understand it very well. For example Sergio who also blogs here: https://bitslog.wordpress.com

I don't see anything there about zkSNARKs?

Sorry to get it personal but it seems you are very shortsighted and need to see a specific keyword to understand the capabilities of the people.

Please let me know what specific topic of zkSNARK you find challenging to explain and we can write a blog post about it.

I don't want to see a specific keyword; all I'm saying is that there is nothing on that website indicating any great knowledge of theoretical cryptography. For instance: no proofs, formal definitions, nothing. Not even links to other websites hosting such things.

I really feel frustrated by your lack of search/manual-crawling/link-clicking/understanding capabilities. He was the official security reviewer of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Then some extra references so you can continue your own search:

- "MPF (Mental Poker Framework): A new family of practical and secure Mental Poker protocols" http://www.dc.uba.ar/inv/tesis/licenciatura/2010/lerner

- MAVEPAY: a new lightweight payment scheme for peer to peer currency networks: https://bitslog.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/mavepay1.pdf

- Strict Memory Hard Hashing Functions: http://www.hashcash.org/papers/memohash.pdf referenced in the Ethereum original paper: http://gavwood.com/paper.pdf

I am not doubting Sergio's security expertise, but security expertise != theoretical cryptography expertise. Crypto requires providing clear definitions and proofs of security. All I see in the first two links are adhoc constructions, with heuristic arguments for security; no security definitions, no reductions, no proofs.

The last link is more formal, and talks about models of computation, but once again does not provide any reductions.

Are you part of the Zcash team?

Off topic, I'd actually be very interested in a cryptographer's guide to zkSNARK...

Here are the topics I'd be happy to hear blog posts about

a) the mechanics of the proof generation, including outlining the time for proof generation.

b) How the trusted setup works; for extra credit describe in detail how zcash plans to do it.

c) an ELI5 explanation of zkSNARKS

d) a comparison of the Ben-sasson and Parno implementations.

Your request was routed internally and we hope to have an article in ~1 month.

Sergio's a great guy, but he does NOT understand the mechanics behind SNARKS "very well". You're overestimating his grasp of the moon-math in SNARKS.

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