Quote from: likeprotocol on September 27, 2018, 02:50:11 PM

Just stumbled upon this article from Mike Orcutt. Man, this can leads to major discussions (eager to see it, though).

Perfect Online Privacy

True internet privacy could finally become possible thanks to a new tool that canfor instancelet you prove youre over 18 without revealing your date of birth, or prove you have enough money in the bank for a financial transaction without revealing your balance or other details. That limits the risk of a privacy breach or identity theft.

The tool is an emerging cryptographic protocol called a zero-knowledge proof. Though researchers have worked on it for decades, interest has exploded in the past year, thanks in part to the growing obsession with cryptocurrencies, most of which arent private.

Much of the credit for a practical zero-knowledge proof goes to Zcash, a digital currency that launched in late 2016. Zcashs developers used a method called a zk-SNARK (for zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge) to give users the power to transact anonymously.

Thats not normally possible in Bitcoin and most other public blockchain systems, in which transactions are visible to everyone. Though these transactions are theoretically anonymous, they can be combined with other data to track and even identify users. Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum, the worlds second-most-popular blockchain network, has described zk-SNARKs as an absolutely game-changing technology.

For banks, this could be a way to use blockchains in payment systems without sacrificing their clients privacy. Last year, JPMorgan Chase added zk-SNARKs to its own blockchain-based payment system.

For all their promise, though, zk-SNARKs are computation-heavy and slow. They also require a so-called trusted setup, creating a cryptographic key that could compromise the whole system if it fell into the wrong hands. But researchers are looking at alternatives that deploy zero-knowledge proofs more efficiently and dont require such a key.

Bitcoin is very huge and very potentiating crypto currency and the most important reason behind the success of bitcoin is that bitcoin promises to have safest and the most confidential transactions as its transactions does not involve any third party seizure so no third person has the right to see the transaction between two and then it also provides user anonymity that makes bitcoin the safest to invest in and this is the reason that people are investing their money with a faith that they are investing their money at right place.