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Confess your love with zero-knowledge

zkcrush.xyz

161–170 of 205 posts

Re: Confess your love with zero-knowledge

#161
post #80
post #2

This is some strange notion of zero-knowledge. If Bob publishes his link, and I want to know who his crush is, I can simply try all our classmates' names and quickly find out that it's Alice. Those games only make at least a bit of sense when everybody enters their crush and only when matching both get notified. Also brute-forceable, but at least it's quadratic (if you suspect nothing about crushes, which is unrealis…

And when everyone is an actual adult, not a manchild or other people without a fully formed prefrontal cortex and thus prone to making ugly, life-changing decisions - for themselves and others - on a dime. That's most of the demographic for this product. The number of over-25 people, not in a committed relationship, who still haven't figured out how to ask people out, is pretty small.

I dunno. I'm reasonably well adjusted and apparently even decently attractive, and I still have a super hard time with the whole asking people out thing. I've been lucky enough to have people ask me out but otherwise I'm not sure I'd have had much luck dating at all.

This tool doesn't do what I'd want, but a tool that did would be kinda neat :)

Re: Confess your love with zero-knowledge

#162
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it’s basically a helpful hint there to maximize the chance that both parties include the same names with the same capitalizations

And it's a unhelpful suggestion to butcher names that aren't correctly formatted that way.

I mean, you would want to handle this correctly for a "real" thing, but this is just a cute demo and that's gonna be a close enough approximation to work for this I think.

Re: Confess your love with zero-knowledge

#164
post #119

I might be an old timer but there used to be a site where you would put in your email and your crushes email and if they did the same you’d both be notified. I don’t remember the name of the site now though.

Here's one: https://catalst.net/

Wow that is evil genius.

Re: Confess your love with zero-knowledge

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In cloud computing Your quote heavily misspells "bullshit marketing" ;) For marketing reasons, people try give things fancy names, even if those names are misused and are completely wrong. This is exactly what happened with all those "zero-knowledge encrypted cloud storages" and so on.

This seems to imply terms can only have and only one “right” definition, which is not how languages work, at all. Clearly there are two big clusters of meaning for “zero-knowledge” and they seem distinct enough to not overlap. Seems fine to me.

Well, you're right.

My problem is that they started doing this my using "zero knowledge" as a term from cryptography. The trend had started in early 2010s or so, as cryptocurrencies and all things crypto became popular, people realized they could use that vibe for profit.

So cloud storage providers in particular had realized "zero knowledge" sounds cool and fancy and started using it in their marketing despite stealthily assigning it entirely different meaning from where they took it from (well, some had their cryptographic designs all backwards recognizably even to my uneducated brain - false promises when most customers don't have sufficient knowledge and awareness, business as usual). They were critiqued for it, and they just shrugged it off because who gives a fuck about some angry nerds insisting on some correct word usage. And so this shit caught on, and yes, now we have two meanings.

I suppose I got to let it go, but I feel upset about the outcome.

Re: Confess your love with zero-knowledge

#166
post #135

This has nothing to do with zero-knowledge crypto. Here's some intuition about what zero-knowledge is actually about: https://minaprotocol.com/blog/kimchi-the-latest-update-to-mi...

Crypto like cryptography or crypto like cryptocurrency?

Aren't they the same? Cryptocurrency is called that because it uses cryptography.

Re: Confess your love with zero-knowledge

#167
This protocol has some downsides - if you share the link with large adversarial group (e.g. your school) they can brute force your crush name and it’s basically no different then embarrassingly shouting out your crush name in public and it has problems with canonical names.

Instead we can alter it and fix this problems: Bob will find out his crush’s public key, encrypt "you are my crush" message to it and post it with his own signature to public bulletin (blockchain can be good shelling point). When crush decrypts message they will see proper string, while everyone else will see gibberish.

- to solve problems with key distribution we can use "identity based encryption". it requires trusted third party (e.g. school administrators) but it solves problem for key generation of participants. With identity encryption bob can encrypt message to some canonical identity such as school email. Owner of that email can prove it’s identity to the third party and receive corresponding private key.

Re: Confess your love with zero-knowledge

#168
post #92
post #10

I hardly see how this is related to zero-knowledge

Yeah zero-knowledge is supposed to give you no usable information, but brute-forcing aside, the fact anyone can learn they are not the target is knowledge, right?

> the fact anyone can learn they are not the target is knowledge, right?

To a point, however, you've also described a Bloom filter reasonably well. That is it would show whether their hash is not in the set.

Re: Confess your love with zero-knowledge

#170
post #139

Nice. Kinda along the lines of what made the current generation of dating apps (starting with Tinder) so popular. Take a large group of 1st and 2nd degree friends. People anonymously select who all they'd like to get with. If there's a match, both parties are notified. If not, no one gets to know. It's such a simple concept, and it's odd that someone like Facebook wasn't able to capitalize on it first despite providi…

Facebook knows enough about you to skip that step and just match you.
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