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Comment by dfdz | Hacker News Reader

I did verify that you found the "harder" treasure, but I am not sure this is a good example of zero knowledge proof. The author claims that

> you can Download the JSON Proof file, and share that publicly. It does not reveal any information of the coordinates you discovered.

But it is not at all clear that the proof does not reveal any information of the coordinates you discovered.

Similarly, it is also unclear that the JSON actually proves that you found the treasure. For example, there could be a specific string in the JSON that the program is checking

It is a cool example of coding, but not of zero knowledge proof in my opinion

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Are you doubting that the application implements the zk-SNARK algorithm correctly? Or doubting that the application actually running on the server is the same as the one in the publicly available source code? Or something else?

The first doubt could be eliminated by an expert investigating the source code. The second doubt is more interesting to me. I wonder how that one could be dispelled.

I don't think anything is being doubted just dumps you the numbers and tells you it is so without explaining why or how making for a weak example.

The entire end-to-end source code (backend and frontend) is available at: https://glitch.com/edit/#!/zk-treasure-hunt?path=README.md%3... . It's a full-stack Glitch example, so you can browse all the code, and fork it and edit it.

Just fwiw the demo runs client side as a static site - no server is really needed for proof generation or verification.

In a more ideal scenario the code and prover/verifier would all be running in a decentralized fashion (see zk-evms and StarkNet for example).

The demo assumes that zkSNARK, circom, snarkjs and my usage of them all works as expected. At some point in the future I can reveal the Proof to demonstrate that I indeed know the hash associated with the Impossible location (the hashes are known: see the source code).

You could also remix the demo and choose your own hashes for each emoji (see console when searching for coordinates to get its hash), and I could then be the one guessing your secret coordinates.

The demo runs locally by the way (no server needed).

If you can show how to go from a proof JSON generated by this app to any piece of information that points even slightly in the direction of the inputs used to generate that proof, I'd love to see it.

Me too, as to do so you'd need to solve P == NP - we can split the $1million 50/50 if you like.

Would you? Are you saying that an oracle which gets some statistical information from such zk-proofs could be used to solve NP-complete problems in (randomized?) polynomial time?

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