Quote from: Evil-Knievel on July 23, 2018, 10:58:44 PM

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So in that sense, this approach is pretty cool. The biggest question mark is though ... if you are just checking the zkSNARK to see whether there exists a transaction chain all the way back to the genesis block, you are exposed to all sorts of attacks: the simplest one is most likely to just create a private side chain where you create a state that you want to spoof to someone else, and somehow submit this state along with perfectly valid zk-SNARKs to your victim. How in this world can he know that state is invalid and that there exists a different state with a "greater cumulative difficulty" containing the same coins spent to someone else (longest chain approach)? I cannot think of any way, but like I said, probably I am just not understanding it correctly

Yes, this is exactly my concern as well.

But in regards to XEL and distributed computing, my question is whether this can be used to somehow verify computations without going through the motions. I don't have enough insights into how zkSnarks work to know or understand whether they can be applied to arbitrary data, or whether the data has to have certain properties.
As far as I know, XEL is currently limited to hard to compute, easy to verify computations. I wonder whether zkSnarks could be a way to get over this limitation.