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On YouTube (23 min)

Computer scientist Amit Sahai, PhD, is asked to explain the concept of zero-knowledge proofs to 5 different people; a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student, and an expert. Using a variety of techniques, Amit breaks down what zero-knowledge proofs are and why it's so exciting in the world of cryptography.

Amit Sahai, PhD, is a professor of computer science at UCLA Samueli School of Engineering.

From S1 E16 of Computer Scientist Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty | WIRED

https://youtu.be/fOGdb1CTu5c

This is the best explanation I have seen [1] : "Computer scientist Amit Sahai, PhD, is asked to explain the concept of zero-knowledge proofs to 5 different people; a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student, and an expert."

[1] https://youtu.be/fOGdb1CTu5c

⬐ YaBomm

None

⬐ sirspacey

I found this a helpful way to ground the concept. Excited to share this one with my kids.

I appreciated the discussion by the experts at the end, but would actually have loved if they dove deeper into how they explain the concept.

It helped me appreciate that perhaps the question needs to mutate in order to deliver more interesting insights. The expert at the end asking the question of “why zero-knowledge instead of zero-information?” added to my appreciation of how special ZKP are as a concept.

I thought this video was pretty good at explaining the basics, actually.

https://youtu.be/fOGdb1CTu5c

agree, ZKProofs are really interesting and i'm sure they will come to be used across lots of areas of the web and not just blockchain, though their use and development is most active in the blockchain space for how useful they are for privacy+scalability.

Proving knowledge without revealing information allows us to prove computations (validating them is a lot quicker than repeating the computation) and "use things" without sacrificing privacy. You can combine the two and have private transactions which are then rolled up in a computation, and then post the proof of the computation to mainnet. You get both cheap and private transactions and infra on top of the base chain.

But this goes beyond blockchain: we can hand code to other people to run and then have proof they haven't altered what we agreed upon running, so we can trust the results of someone else running something. That is useful in all sorts of research for replicability in science/engineering.

WIRED Computer Scientist Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOGdb1CTu5c

https://developers.aztec.network/

https://z.cash/technology/zksnarks/

https://github.com/matter-labs/awesome-zero-knowledge-proofs

⬐ drog

> i'm sure they will come to be used across lots of areas of the web and not just blockchain

Totally agree with this. After working closely with zk I noticed that it boosts your thinking about decentralized protocols in the same way as knowing about signatures or hashes.

Right now infrastructure for doing zk is in “alpha” stage and different proving systems and optimizations are fairly new and not widely used. I believe it will grow bigger It’s very exciting field.

(I worked on zk rollup called zksync but zk rollups are only one of the use cases for zk proofs)