It's refreshing to see an article about "crypto" on the HN front page that's about cryptography, not cryptocurrency.
Cryptocurrency content ages like milk. Some of the original papers are worth reading of course, but by 2016 the influencers and hype shills had thoroughly taken over. That was the era when Buterin was calling Ethereum “a global supercomputer” with a straight face.
Do you think Groth16 counts? So named because it was written by Groth in 2016. Groth16 introduces the first really practical zero knowledge proving scheme. I'm pretty sure it's used by zcash as well as Filecoin, and projects like Tornado cash. It opened the floodgates on verifiable computation techniques that are used for everything from scaling to privacy.
Every year there's a ton of braindead noise, obviously, but every year there are also fundamental breakthroughs that change how we compute.
Actually, specifically because of Groth16, the "world computer" concept is becoming more and more possible every day. When you have verifiable computing, you shift the paradigm from every node on the network having to verify every state transition to any given state transition only needing to be verified by one machine somewhere in the world, once (which can be done in parallel with the proving of every other state transition). This means something like a blockchain network is now only limited in scale by how much compute you can throw at it, and as the algorithms get faster, and the compute gets better, we're seeing multiple orders of magnitude throughput increases every year. Things have been getting pretty wild in the cryptocurrency space for the past couple years, and the future looks insane.
edit: For people interested in diving into WTF "verifiable computing" is, this is a really awesome project that does some cool stuff with it that I'm not affiliated with in any way : https://github.com/risc0/risc0
P.S I think "global computer", "verifiable computation" are a make believe concept if you ask a computer scientist. Sounds good on paper and feel futuristic though.
I don't think cryptographers believe it's a "make believe concept", at least not the ones I know.
Verifiable computation doesn't require your faith. It works, and it's powering several billion dollar economies at the moment, and growing like crazy. By all means you're free to demonstrate that the math is faulty. Basically every project in that space has a million+ dollar bounty program for such bugs.
Isn’t it so that in general verifiable computation needs a trusted setup phase? Although it can be run between multiple parties, still one needs to have faith in their honesty.
Only a small subset of computations does not require a trusted setup phase. Proof of shuffle and threshold decryption comes to my mind as examples.
It’s only the rest of the mainstream business world that hasn’t yet caught on to the value it can provide. There are numerous good ideas for using it in business contexts that aren’t being done yet. It’s mainly the cryptocurrency ecosystem that grokked its value first and have been rapidly deploying it into production.
Second line: No way. Very little of the cryptocurrency ecosystem and industry actually do verifiable compute in any meaningful sense.
A lot is API calls to third-party trusted services (who are probably doing that, yes).
https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-r...
In 2023 alone, maybe 5 or so fully functional proving systems for running verifiable compute in the Ethereum Virtual Machine have been launched, and are currently live and operational. It's still early days, and there's a lot more work that needs to be done to fulfill the vision, but progress is happening faster than anyone expected.
In the case of HTTP calls to SaaS providers, that's part of the promise of verifiable computation - that you can outsource it to a provider and verify that both the input and the computation are what you specified, and thus that you can trust the output. Even if its running in an otherwise black box on the SaaS provider's infrastructure.
ETA: I just noticed I'm responding to Madars ;)
I'm kind of fond of cheese.
https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...