Stanford Seminar - MS&E447: ZKP Panel with Dan Boneh, Jens Groth , Daniel Marin, and Ravi Mhatre

Blockchain Technology

• Ravi MRE, a venture capitalist, joined the blockchain space in 2013 due to the potential of Bitcoin and its underlying technology.
• Jens Groth, a cryptography expert, joined in 2019 after realizing the practical applications of zero-knowledge proofs.
• Daniel Marin, the founder of Nexus, was drawn to blockchain through his interest in cryptography and its potential to program people through economic incentives.
• Ravi advises students to consider current market cycles when choosing between machine learning and blockchain, suggesting blockchain may be more promising for investment.
• The speaker compares blockchain's potential to the early internet, highlighting its ability to interconnect billions of people.
• Recent advancements in zero-knowledge proofs and cryptography enable scalable and reliable distributed systems.
• Solidity and EVMs are emerging as standard primitives for computation in the network, similar to TCP/IP for communication.
• Blockchain technology, with its emphasis on cryptography and distributed ledgers, is poised to become the substrate for future applications.
• The decreasing cost of GPU compute cycles contributes to the viability of blockchain technology.
• Blockchain has the potential to revolutionize how we interact with compute and machines, serving as the foundation for advanced AI applications.

Zero-Knowledge Proofs

• Zero-knowledge proofs are useful in the blockchain space due to the slow and expensive nature of blockchains.
• Zero-knowledge proofs have the potential to revolutionize society by enabling a "verified society" where data origin and correctness can be easily verified.
• The cost of zero-knowledge proofs is currently high but rapidly improving, potentially becoming much closer to traditional computation costs in the future.
• Zero-knowledge proofs can be used to parallelize blockchains, reducing costs and increasing verification efficiency.
• Prover Networks allow users to outsource proof generation to others with idle compute power.
• The Nexus project aims to gather compute power from many individuals to collaboratively compute proofs.
• Zero-knowledge taxes exemplify using a Prover Network to generate proofs about private data without revealing it.
• Implementing ZK taxes requires collecting ground truth data and ensuring security through techniques like multiparty computation.
• Collaborative proofs aim to combine the privacy-preserving properties of multi-party computation (MPC) with the verifiability of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs).
• Zero-knowledge proofs have broader applications beyond blockchain, including media, voting, and other areas.

Verifiability and Trust

• Blockchains provide a collective agreement on primitives around computing data, combined with scalable ways of proving various things, enabling new applications and verifiability networks.
• Verifiable AI training and evaluation are gaining interest, especially in the industry.
• Verifiable AI evaluation is faster and cheaper compared to training.
• Proof of stake has cryptoeconomic security, but mathematical guarantees and proofs that transcend time can only be achieved through mathematics.
• Zero-knowledge proofs provide verifiability that can be built upon by others, ensuring composability and modularity.