> It doesn’t matter, does it? That computation happens off-chain.
It does matter if the speed of proof generation off-chain lags behind the speed of the underlying blockchain itself. If your blockchain needs to slow down waiting for off-chain provers, it doesn't matter how fast on-chain verification is.
> And despite the hype, the practical use cases for Turing complete smart contracts are quite small and limited in scope. If you have a smart contract with real world applicability that can’t be reduced down to a handful of easily checked signatures and if-else clauses (or something of similar complexity), I’d like to see it. I know of scant few examples, and this is my field of expertise.
It's ironic that someone working on ZK tech would decry the "hype" surrounding Turing-complete smart contracts, considering how much value has been generated by the later and how little concrete utility has been generated by the former (with the dubious exception of privacy coins and tumblers).
Are you saying that all of DeFi (Maker, Uniswap, Aave, Synthetix, etc, etc) can be "reduced down to a handful of easily checked signatures and if-else clauses"?
It's an interesting assertion, but a bit of a stretch, don't you think?
It doesn’t matter, does it? That computation happens off-chain.
As an actual example, there are contracts locked to providing a collision proof for various hash functions. The one for SHA1 was claimed a few years ago when Google generated the first SHA-1 collision. That represented a lot of work on Google’s behalf, but was trivial for bitcoin nodes to validate.
> Due to performance limitations, for all intents and purposes ZK tech is impractical to the point of being infeasible for truly decentralized blockchains with turing-complete smart contract capabilities. It works for more specialized purposes, but it is not a currently solution to the "duplicative computation" problem.
You misunderstand me. I’m not suggesting that such a general zkp system be used, but rather offering it as a theoretical point.
In practice you make a specialized zk proof for whatever you are trying to do. And despite the hype, the practical use cases for Turing complete smart contracts are quite small and limited in scope. If you have a smart contract with real world applicability that can’t be reduced down to a handful of easily checked signatures and if-else clauses (or something of similar complexity), I’d like to see it. I know of scant few examples, and this is my field of expertise.