What does HackerNews think of risc0?

I was thinking that one of the PoS papers might fit, but the Tendermint paper was 2014, and the Casper FFG paper was 2017.

Do you think Groth16 counts? So named because it was written by Groth in 2016. Groth16 introduces the first really practical zero knowledge proving scheme. I'm pretty sure it's used by zcash as well as Filecoin, and projects like Tornado cash. It opened the floodgates on verifiable computation techniques that are used for everything from scaling to privacy.

Every year there's a ton of braindead noise, obviously, but every year there are also fundamental breakthroughs that change how we compute.

Actually, specifically because of Groth16, the "world computer" concept is becoming more and more possible every day. When you have verifiable computing, you shift the paradigm from every node on the network having to verify every state transition to any given state transition only needing to be verified by one machine somewhere in the world, once (which can be done in parallel with the proving of every other state transition). This means something like a blockchain network is now only limited in scale by how much compute you can throw at it, and as the algorithms get faster, and the compute gets better, we're seeing multiple orders of magnitude throughput increases every year. Things have been getting pretty wild in the cryptocurrency space for the past couple years, and the future looks insane.

edit: For people interested in diving into WTF "verifiable computing" is, this is a really awesome project that does some cool stuff with it that I'm not affiliated with in any way : https://github.com/risc0/risc0

You can actually write zkps in pure Rust, but there's not currently any blockchain integration: https://github.com/risc0/risc0

The performance of ZK systems is improving rapidly, for example the startup I'm at has one which is likely already much faster than what the authors used (development is ongoing): https://github.com/risc0/risc0

The security implications of current decrypting MITM middleboxes are pretty bad so it's worth going to some lengths to find an alternative.