@SEJPM The reason ZKP is so popular now is cryptocurrency.

It's basically The Way to Achieve Perfect Anonymity™ and everyone wants it.

Sounds right. We all missed the opportunity to make a "zero knowledge" joke. I'm certain that's because no one thought of making one. Not because it was too easy of a joke.

One thing that consistently bothers me is the way people with nearly zero knowledge of a subject pretend to be the only enlightened person in the room and do it by saying really cliche garbage, adding superfluous adjectives, or pretending they're brave for an "unpopular opinion" that's actually simultaneously popular and wrong (either morally or factually).

"Untraceable bitcoin" is a funny one. "Military grade" is another one. "Innovative" is a word most often applied to old ideas implemented poorly in shiny packages. When someone's network gets hacked because of weak passwords, phishing, or decade old unpatched computers it's not corporate or managerial neglect, it's always sensationalized as a "sophisticated" hack no one could have forseen.

@FutureSecurity That "sophisticated hack" business is certainly at least sometimes applied to save the face of the company that gets hacked. Saying "It was a trivial vulnerability that any security-competent site/machine would have been immune to" doesn't save face the same way claiming your attackers were unstoppable does.

Your first rant reminds me of one particular user of crypto.se

there have been others, but usually they drop one or two poorly received answers and then give up

@EllaRose It's usually crafty communists that are simultaneously elite haxors and bumbling incompetents in every other realm that sophisticate their way into computer networks as a product of pure evilness.

Such hacks aren't discovered. They spring forth fully formed from blood sacrifice from a goat. Discovery would imply the bugs were always there to exploit and might implicate for-profit institutions, who perhaps could have caught the problem with an increased budget.

Hmm. Remember the 2014 hack of Sony Motion Pictures? As I remember the timeline: 1) Hackers launch a website condemning SMP for discriminating based on race and gender and leak emails, salaries, and films. 2) Analysts claim that there's malware and it contained hard-coded paths, passwords, and (I think) intranet IP addresses. 3) US State Department said North Korea did the hack.

4) People begin saying North Korea hacked Sony to threaten them into withdraw their Seth Rogan movie about assassinating North Korea's leader, 5) North Korea announces that they hacked SMP and that they want Sony to withdraw the movie.

The first week it was more scandal than Matter Of National Security. Timeline point 3 came a week after 1. Up until then the assumption was it was several employees unhappy with their employers. Then the new narrative took over the old one.

Sounds "conspiracy theory"-like. But hearing the news in real time definitely changed my thought process about news like that... I think the first narrative makes more sense based on Occams razor. But I see how coincidence, incentives, and face-saving could make the second narrative more appealing.

Foreign hackers > gender wage gap in terms of news audience engagement. Another foreign boogieman is good for politicians. North Korea was happy to take credit because it made themselves look powerful. And Sony got a lot more people to pay for a movie than they otherwise would have. Every party benefited.

I wish my country could have nice things. And I don't mean like iPhone nice and mass transportation infrastructure nice. I mean like software that is nice AND doesn't spy on you and which aren't unfixable messes. And fast comfortable public transportation instead of everyone needing a car and having bridges that are on the verge of collapse.

Which brings me full circle. Cryptocurrency is not a nice thing. You don't need to be an expert in cryptography, network protocols, macro economics, or politics to think everything crypto is awesome, and most people who think it's awesome have Zero Knowledge in all those topics.

Otherwise smart but not tech minded people even think it's the miracle solution to everything from election fraud to monopoly.... Frequently use the word "blockchain" as if it's magic and it starts to sound more like an incantation than a proposed solution

Survey: What's the definition of CSPRNG? Is backtracking resistance required or optional?

I learned crypto through several years of reading papers that initially all went over my head, not formal education. So sometimes I mess up definitions and I don't know authoritative sources to check to know for sure.