^[1] the cool thing about these proofs is that they can be verified in much less time than is required to run the program. IIRC, starks can be verified in log-polynomial time, and snarks can be verified in constant time. This allows cryptocurrency protocols to have one computer in the network generate a proof of the state of the chain given a new block, and all other are able to quickly check it. Without this, you have a ton of waste because every computer in the network must duplicate the work of computing the new chain state. (although some new waste is introduced by the fact that producing a proof is very slow, although this is another area that cryptocurrency-funded research has improved dramatically)
Another cool bit of cryptography research that I think was motivated by crypto was “verkle trees”, an improvement on merkle trees that uses vector commitments rather than your typical hash. A vector commitment is like a hash, but it hashes an array of items and you can check that the hash was produced from an array with a certain item at a certain index without knowing the other items in the array. If you use this to back a merkle tree, you can increase the branching factor a lot and end up with much smaller proofs that a particular item is in the tree. This is because the proof size for a merkle tree is b * log_b n (where b is the branching factor and n is the number of items in the tree). The proof size for a verkle tree is just log_b n, so you can increase b as much as you want without making the proofs bigger.
Full disclosure: I work for a blockchain company, but not one mentioned here. I have no equity or stake in crypto outside of the fact that if the price goes to 0 my company probably can no longer afford to employ me
Does it? Starkware is mentioned only as the company run by some.guy who commented on how pivotal this work was.
It doesn't say he was related, and I can't find any affiliation between the researchers (all uk based at Cambridge and Warwick) and the US based StarkWare.
They're not actually that complicated in principle, just nobody thought of it before and that's pretty cool.
You mean this article?
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/06/18/verkle.html
> Verkle trees are still a new idea; they were first introduced by John Kuszmaul in this paper from 2018[link to [0]],
0: https://math.mit.edu/research/highschool/primes/materials/20...
How do you quickly verify that traveling salesman path is indeed the shortest one?