I've been thinking about ZKP's a lot recently. Using them we could perhaps build interesting and useful decentralised social media protocols. You could create a union at your workplace where you make agreements with everyone but you only communicate directly with your closest colleagues. You could create anonymous groups of doctors in a certain region that listen to reggae three times a week that think it would be worth renovating the cafeteria.

It would be a better foundation for the social contract than tick tock videos. But you'd need to make ZKP understandable and interactive for the average user.

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lanternfish 9 hours ago | parent [-]

The problem is the same problem with crypto dao projects - cryptographic certainties only apply to mathematical structures; you can't validate that someone actually holds a quality until you can embed that digitally. That turns out to be very hard to do for most things.

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eru 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, what Zero Knowledge proofs give you however is composability.

Eg suppose you have one system that lets you verify 'this person has X dollars in their bank account' and another system that lets you verify 'this person has a passport of Honduras' and another system that lets you verify 'this person has a passport of Germany', then whether the authors of these three systems ever intended to or not, you can prove a statement like 'this person has a prime number amount of dollars and has a passport from either Honduras or Germany'.

I see the big application not in building a union. For that you'd want something like Off-The-Record messaging probably? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-record_messaging

Where I see the big application is in compliance, especially implementing know-your-customer rules, while preserving privacy. So with a system outlined as above, a bank can store a proof that the customer comes from one of the approved countries (ie not North Korea or Russia etc) without having to store an actual copy of the customer's passport or ever even learning where the customer is from.

As you mentioned, for this to work you need to have an 'anchor' to the real world. What ZKP gives you is a way to weave a net between these anchors.

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alfiedotwtf 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Wow, that’s a neat idea - composable but verifiable notaries!

	▲	eru 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, they have to be verifiable offline (or sort-of offline) as a prerequisite. ZKP gives you the composition.