Charles’ quick video on Zero-Knowledge Proof Workshop - 02/04/2020
(Written by @Eric_Czuleger)
On April 2nd 2020, Charles Hoskinson sat down for a quick update where he promoted the upcoming online ZKProof Workshop. While he was previously slated for attendance, the recent global pandemic has made the organizers move the event online.
Zero-knowledge proof workshop
This is the third annual ZKProof Workshop it will be held April 20th through May 21st, if you are interested in joining the workshop to see the thought leaders in the cryptocurrency space discussing zero knowledge protocols and cryptography, you can sign up to attend digitally, below:
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It is vital that people understand that this is not just academic research. This is among the most applied and most relevant research in the cryptocurrency space. This is the only way that we can preserve inclusive accountability long term. Inclusive accountability is the idea that everyone checks one another’s work. There is universal verification through every actor running an algorithm on their computer and understanding that what people are receiving is correct.
Scalability and privacy
However, as blockchains grow into multi-asset, voting, and property registration it will eventually grow from the size of megabytes to petabytes of information. This will be impossible for normal users to verify the totality of all history within the system. That means that less and less people will be able to verify the source of truth at the node level.
Furthermore, as we perform more complicated transactions like smart contracts and state dependent contracts it will become more difficult for the average user to verify the blockchain. Meanwhile, all transactions will need to be private. Zero-knowledge contracts go a long way to help with privacy, scalability and inclusive accountability. With all this being said, this is a very important workshop.
State of the art
It is an academic conference which shows the state of the art of what the industry as a whole is doing to solve these problems and standardize existing solutions which have occurred. We recently published a paper called Sonic in 2018. We spent over a year implementing this paper and bringing it through Rust code to the world. It is an improved zero-knowledge proof system.
Our engineers will be at this conference to present their innovations to the space. Now that it is a virtual conference, everyone in the world can attend and everyone can gain realistic expectations of where the space is and where it is going. It will also give people an idea of what things can be used off the shelf. We hope that everyone can make it to at least one of the sessions. Attendance will be in the form of a Zoom conference link.