An Interesting Zero Knowledge Use Case?

5 points by genseng 8 hours ago

Preface: I’m a student (in my 30’s, went back to school for an MS in CS), so I view this mostly as a learning exercise.

I’ve been curious about crypto for a while, and recently started learning about ZK Proofs, Plonk, SNARKs, zkvms, etc.

I wonder if an immediate application could be something along the lines of Bot proof/proof of personhood, which seems to be a difficult problem and appears to be getting more difficult with AI (though correct me if I’m wrong). When I think about it, truly proving someone is a bot seems difficult without meeting them in real life and sitting side by side with them while they interact online. And yet, what if each of us could monitor our entire Internet activity i.e. locally store the packets we send and receive, and then provide a ZK-Proof of this history to anyone who asks during a login process. This would exist at the protocol level perhaps, or maybe built in to the browser. But the whole idea is that certain packets would be impossible for a bot to generate. Perhaps it is logging in to your bank, or paying your electricity bill, or logging into your health portal and using health data. Anything that connects to the real world. You would never want to show internet strangers/services your bank statement or EMR information, but a ZK-Proof accomplishes exactly what we are looking for in this case - proof without revealing the underlying data.

An alternative idea could be that the browsing history of a person might look very different than the history of a bot, thus creating a sort of digital fingerprint, though this seems like it could be faked with enough time and effort.

I’m curious what folks think, especially those with experience/expertise in the ZK/crypto space. Thanks!