We’re starting to live in a “zk” world. Every day I continue to see more see zero-knowledge implementations all over the place (most recent being Polygon’s recursive proof Plonky 2 impl.).
This has me wondering the following: Who is the “authority” on all of this? Is there work being done that’s overlapping? How can that be prevented? Should it be prevented or should it be allowed to increase competition? Ultimately we’re all working towards one goal which is a private decentralized world.
It seems like I’m starting to understand the collaboration with the Ethereum Foundation a bit better, but it also seems like there are currently many horses in this race and I wonder how many will be getting sent to the glue factory and for what reason.
The way I think of ZK technology is similar to the advanced sciences or advanced mathematics academic fields. The more people study it, the higher likelihood of breakthroughs.
There are several different experts from a wide range of academics that contributed to making Zcash a reality:
I’m pretty sure they are all continuing to work on ZK tech at their own schools/ universities individually and there is ongoing research by the ECC core development team, Starkware, Ethereum Foundation, etc…
As with any technology there are many people working on advancing it. I don’t think it’s possible to “control” or “prevent” people from advancing the state of the art, nor would I want to see an attempt to do so.
The best we can do is continue fund talented people that can look at all this research and know if/how/when/ to pull in the latest proven version of the tech to upgrade Zcash with.
Fair. I wouldn’t want that, but obviously I favor a specific horse in the race
Underrated comment. I agree. Without the dev fund, it’d be stuck. We can see that from Doge being more reactive than proactive when Elon gave it attention.
Same here. So far seems off to a positive consensus amongst the community.
