[Cryptography] Quillon Graph: A private, post-quantum electronic cash system

[jrzx]

> The scaling path is the same one every blockchain project faces:
> sharding, state channels, rollups, or some combination.
> We have not implemented any of these.

The reason sharding used to be impossible is that there used to be no way the peers doing the work for one shard could trust the peers managing another shard, short of having every transaction and verifying it, which would make sharding pointless.

But, with succinct proofs, sharding should be inherent, because you do not need to have, or store, or verify every transaction, merely verify a short proof that proves many transactions, you only need to store the transactions that matter to you, and proofs that their inputs were valid.  Why is it needful to have full peers that have and store every transaction?

For a long time litecoin has been rolling up lots of proofs of validity of lots of transactions into a single proof.

Nova https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/370.pdf folds two proofs into one proof, so each party creating a transaction can prove the validity of each output from that transaction, and fold that proof with nearest transaction output of another party, and so forth recursively all the way to a single proof for all outputs, as if it was all one very big transanction.  That is the technology of unlimited scaling that came in sight in 2016.  We know, in principle, how to do it, and have known, in principle, how to do it for over a decade.

This is the big potential  of succinct proofs -- privacy not because data is public but encrypted, but rather privacy *and* *scaling* because most data never becomes public at all.

Forget about zero knowledge.  Privacy does not pay the bills.  Succinct does pay the bills.

Regrettably no one seems to care all that much about privacy, but they care very much about blockchain size and transactions per second.

If lots of people have to keep the entire blockchain around, it does not scale.  All existing successful blockchains have huge scaling problems which have led to terrifying centralization in huge data centers.  The primary value of succinct proofs is that they are succinct.  Everything else is secondary.  No one seems to care enough about zero knowledge to reach for his checkbook.


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: publickey - jrzx at protonmail.ch - 0x4B137C8A.asc
Type: application/pgp-keys
Size: 1718 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20260330/479afc94/attachment.key>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 603 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20260330/479afc94/attachment.sig>