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How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

quantamagazine.org

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Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#91

Post by jraph »

bockchain wrote: post #38

> How to prove you know a secret without giving it away This is the best use case for blockchain. Put the secret on the blockchain and show others that transaction. Since it's on blockchain, no one can deny your claim about knowing the secret. This is why blockchain was invented. Before blockchain, I was miserable. There was no way for me to prove to my girlfriends that I knew a secret, without telling the secret. No…

> Put the secret on the blockchain and show others that transaction

You missed the "without giving it away" part.

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#92

Post by sandos »

seewhydee wrote: post #40

Scientists used to use anagrams to register scientific discoveries without revealing them. Hooke registered his law of elastic extension using the letters "ceiiinosssttuv”, which he later revealed to unscramble into "ut tensio, sic vis" ("as the tension, so the force"). People did try to brute-force the anagrams. On two occasions, Kepler unscrambled analgrams from Galileo into the statements that (i) Mars has two moo…

I used to play a social deduction game on IRC, and this was one method to reveal things without revealing them.... but it was too powerful so was banned sort of.

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#93

Post by MonkeyMalarky »

nikau wrote: post #47
nayaketo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before blockchain, I was miserable. This part gives it away. Also his username which is probably misspelled deliberately.

Bockchain - human centipede but with chickens

Bockchain - digital pecking order

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#94

Post by IncRnd »

scifibestfi wrote: post #63
getcrunk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet $1000 that this is an ai bot. Hn should have a bot that bans bots

How can you tell with that level of confidence?

He can tell, because he has a secret bot detection bot. That bot can detect 100% correctly with no false-positives, as long as he never reveals how it operates. The bot is named ZeroK.

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#95

Post by raverbashing »

scifibestfi wrote: post #63
getcrunk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet $1000 that this is an ai bot. Hn should have a bot that bans bots

How can you tell with that level of confidence?

He doesn't need to, he only needs to be confident that someone with more knowledge (or confidence) in the actual status of the commenter won't make a counter-bet

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#96

Post by DreamFlasher »

sandos wrote: post #92
seewhydee wrote: post #40

Scientists used to use anagrams to register scientific discoveries without revealing them. Hooke registered his law of elastic extension using the letters "ceiiinosssttuv”, which he later revealed to unscramble into "ut tensio, sic vis" ("as the tension, so the force"). People did try to brute-force the anagrams. On two occasions, Kepler unscrambled analgrams from Galileo into the statements that (i) Mars has two moo…

I used to play a social deduction game on IRC, and this was one method to reveal things without revealing them.... but it was too powerful so was banned sort of.

Can you elaborate? Where can we find more about this game?

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#97

Post by paganel »

pexabit wrote: post #12
defrost wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As demonstrated in central north america recently the real challenge isn't in proving election results .. it's in the greater social challenge of propagating belief and trust in the results in the face of concerted efforts to widely undermine such. That's a whole other kettle of fish.

Well secure and rather indisputably valid elections are a solved problem, and many countries manage it. Identified electors cast ballots on paper counted under recorded and public observation. (I think a scantron would be fine, too). It is just that we choose not to do this. A provably convincing election isn’t actually some hard, unsolved problem. (And yes- if you mention zero knowledge proofs in your story of why t…

> Identified electors

How do you reliably identify them without an ID card (which, as I understand it, the US doesn't have), or without an election-related "ID card" (which is pretty much the same thing)?

Trying to use SSNs will of course result in economically disadvantaged people having no right to vote, the same goes, more or less, if trying to rely on driver's licenses.

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#98

Post by PeeMcGee »

can16358p wrote: post #78

I'm confused about the maze example in the article: I can "prove" that I know the path to exit as I traverse the maze in limited time, okay. But interactive proofs have many iterations to sufficiently convince the verifier, however if I found the exit by luck in first try, I've already found it and I can simply follow the same path in the next iterations. How does the interactivity exactly work with the maze example?

Yeah, this article tries too hard to appeal to all audiences in a way that ends up making it confusing for everyone. Starts off with the clumsy maze example, then hops over into graph theory and NP-complete proofs, then hand waves something about sharing bits and quantum computing... But enough about that, it turns out blockchain will prevent nuclear war!

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#100

Post by Huh1337 »

sdoering wrote: post #44
bockchain wrote: post #38

> How to prove you know a secret without giving it away This is the best use case for blockchain. Put the secret on the blockchain and show others that transaction. Since it's on blockchain, no one can deny your claim about knowing the secret. This is why blockchain was invented. Before blockchain, I was miserable. There was no way for me to prove to my girlfriends that I knew a secret, without telling the secret. No…

If all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail. Thanks for this grandiose piece of satire.

Well this actually is a good usecase for blockchain, though... The very original Bitcoin client contained this functionality already.

Very ironic usage of this quote, imho. Almost like - "even a broken clock is correct 2 times a day"

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