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Comment by hanniabu | Hacker News Reader

I assume you're referring to the blockchain industry, but they've advanced cryptography a lot, specifically with zkproofs.

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No, I'm referring to the FHE startups that are promising a lot of magic that isn't really feasible, while failing to solve what is feasible.

I know of the concept of zero-knowledge proofs, but didn't know that the blockchain industry advanced cryptography a lot in that area. What are the practical applications of those new things? Or which new things are there to begin with? The Wikipedia article on zero-knowledge proof doesn't seem to say

With zk you can prove you own something or sign transactions without people tracking your entire history. It is also used to help scale chains by rolling up multiple transactions into one proof.

One of the applications are ZK-Rollups [1] which allow developers to move heavy computation off a blockchain. The blockchain receives the results and only validates proofs that they are valid. This is especially useful on Ethereum because its computational throughput is pretty low.

There's also ZCash [2], which is a cryptocurrency that lets you make untraceable transactions. This is in stark contrast to Bitcoin or Ethereum, where transaction information is available publicly to everyone. They have a series of blog posts [3] on the math that actually makes it work under the hood.

[1] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/scaling/zk-rollups/

[2] https://z.cash

[3] https://electriccoin.co/blog/snark-explain/

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