A conference to save us from the blockchain: ZkProof “home edition”

ZkProof workshop was supposed to be a great meeting for academics and those interested in zero-knowledge proofs, but the Covid19 emergency prevented the workshop from taking place normally. The organizers did not give up and created the “ZkProof home edition“.

The blockchain is growing in size and no normal user will be able to independently manage the large amount of data necessary to reconstruct an event.

In order to avoid that this problem backfires, it is necessary to study useful solutions for a more accurate management of data exchange and privacy.

We are extremely excited to share the details of the ZKProof Home Edition.
Join us on an immersive workshop with top researchers, industry leaders and the recent developments in the Zero-Knowledge ecosystem, spanning over 5-weeks
Details and tickets(£30): https://t.co/4HzHhTTITG pic.twitter.com/aax6sOwFAr

— ZKProof Standards (@zkproof) March 29, 2020

The objectives of the ZkProof initiative are to promote the standardization of Zero-knowledge proof cryptography and increase the involvement of companies and researchers worldwide. 

The largest workshop ever organized on ZkProof will be available online and, thanks to the effort of the organizers, the topics will be accessible to all interested parties.

From April 20th to May 21st, the workshops will cover a longer period of time than the traditional 3 days of discussions. For 5 weeks every Monday and Thursday, a 3-hour presentation and discussion will be hosted. A comprehensive and worthwhile program for all those interested in cryptography and beyond.

Why are ZKProofs important?

Fundamentally, zero-knowledge proofs are a cryptographic technique that improves privacy and allows one party (a prover) to convince another party (a verifier) that some computational statements are correct without revealing any information except the veracity of the statement. 

This innovative technology allows demonstrating data integrity without revealing any underlying details about the data.

Zero-knowledge proof was first introduced in the 80s by Professor Shafi Goldwasser and the famous Italian professor and researcher Silvio Micali, well known in the blockchain field for having founded Algorand.

As pointed out in a recent comment by Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano, one of the most important things at this point is what he defines as “inclusive accountability“.

“This is not just a conference for academics, but it is the most important research among all those related to the space of cryptocurrencies and blockchain”.

As observed from the first discussions born in 2009 with Bitcoin, one of the things possible thanks to the blockchain is summarized in the famous phrase “Don’t trust. Verify“. 

Thanks to the traceability and transparency of the blockchain, a simple look at the database allows to figure out the history of a message and verify its nature.

The blockchain is growing and no normal user will be able to manage the large amount of data required to reconstruct an event.

• Let’s imagine this in the following fields:
• Voting systems;
• Property registration;
• Exchange of representative assets;

Payment systems.

Ordinary people could lose control of this technology, which was created to disintermediate and avoid the centralization of power.

Ever fewer people will be able to participate in the network (full node) due to the size of the nodes.

The digitalization of contracts, the complexity and plurality of the systems introduced, will create a strong separation between operators and end-users.

For this reason. the privacy of transactions and the possibility to make scalable a system that allows choosing the degree of secrecy of a communication is fundamental.

Currently, ZkProofs are the only technology that allows imagining this possibility, making the conference a great place to compare them with existing technologies, their standardization and evolution.