Another Cryptocurrency Use Case Gift: The growing importance of Zero-Knowledge and Privacy focused wallets is a failure of apologies.

1. If you make a mistake which as a human you are likely to make then you are in serious trouble.

2. If you make a mistake that was not a mistake yesterday but is today (seeing that definitions are now mostly a group-think) then you are in serious trouble.

3. If you made a mistake when you were young and stupid, the internet does not forget and the world will not forgive you

Whatever your genuine mistake is or was and you are caught in the culture war, or on the other side of the group think you are in serious trouble, you will be punished and there is no limit to the extent of punishment you deserve, everything is on the table, your job, your family, your investments and money, your sympathizers everything will be targeted. I am sorry is no longer acceptable.

Perceived wrong-doers suffer the same fate, I say perceived because the rules of right and wrong are now fluid and guided by group-thing or authorities-say, it does not have to be a formal crime or a judgment after your day in court; take the case of the Canadian Truckers(now it doesn’t matter if you do support them or not), you can’t just arbitrarily do what gofundme attempted to do, seized funds donated to Truckers and threatened to distribute it as they deemed fit, that is the seed of anarchy, where no formal process is needed.

Or your crime could simply be a different opinion, these days what constitute a crime is blur. whichever category you may find yourself, or worried about finding yourself you all of a sudden realize you need to protect yourself, starting with shielding your finances and investments; to achieve this you will need more control over your finances and have extensive privacy about your sources and uses of funds; And of course crypto comes to the rescue to give you more control and privacy wallets and zero-knowledge protocols on Blockchain platforms helps create privacy.

So what are Privacy Wallets and what do they try to do.

Contrary to what many believe, you are not anonymous on blockchains, You leave a trail of digital information on the blockchain, which can show what DApps you’ve used, transfers you’ve made, and the crypto assets you hold, what blockchain crypto ensure is that you have complete control of your funds globally not subject to government policies and exchange rules as in the case of fiat currencies, to have privacy in your crypto transactions you need privacy wallets that ensure that your activities cannot be traced, privacy wallets are often built using Zero-Knowledge(zk) protocols.

Zero-Knowledge Protocols built on Blockchain = Privacy

According to Wikipedia - zero-knowledge protocol is a method by which one party (the prover) can prove to another party (the verifier) that a given statement is true while the prover avoids conveying any additional information apart from the fact that the statement is indeed true. The essence of zero-knowledge proofs is that it is trivial to prove that one possesses knowledge of certain information by simply revealing it; the challenge is to prove such possession without revealing the information itself or any additional information.

In lay man terms zk means to prove an information is true without revealing the details of that information, or Zero knowledge encryption basically states that data is kept secure via a unique user or encryption key, one that even the application developer does not know. You, and only you, can access your encryption key.

For example: A Colour-blind friend and Two ball :

There are two friends Sachin and Sanchita; Sanchita is colour blind. Sachin has two balls and he needs to prove that both balls are of different colours. Sanchita switches the balls randomly behind her back and shows it to Sachin who has to tell if the balls are switched or not. If the balls are of the same colour then Sachin has given false information, the probability of him answering correctly is 50%. When the activity is repeated several times, the probability of Sachin giving the correct answer with the false information is significantly low. Here Sachin is the “prover” and Sanchita is the “verifier”. Colour is the absolute information or the algorithm to be executed, and it is proved of its soundness without revealing the information that is the colour to the verifier.

So why don’t all web services use Zero-Knowledge?

So the question on your mind is why do all internet/web services not use this technology, the system is slower than regular services, and so service providers who are really more interested in revenue are more interested in providing faster services for more people than securing you or ensuring your privacy online. This slowness of ZK-encryption has led to new approaches and zk-platforms like Aleo that use zk but are still fast

Aleo a Zero-Knowledge platforms for developers to build zk-applications on blockchain, to achieve this Aleo developed a new language called Leo.

The Privacy Wallet like – BlockWallet.

BlockWallet uses Cryptographic proofs (zk-SNARKs) to allow users to make deposits and withdrawals using smart contracts that render funds untraceable. You can use BlockWallet to transfer funds to an address with no links to your history on the blockchain. All the while making the experience easier and easier to achieve.

Conclusion

By refusing to be humane, accept apologies, forgive and move on, society is invariably creating another use case or reason for the adoption of cryptocurrency, zero-knowledge protocols like Aleo and wallets built for privacy like BlockWallet

References.

1. Zero Knowledge Proof - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof

2. Geeks for Geeks, Zero Knowledge Proof.(2022,02,18). https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/zero-knowledge-proof/

3. Kath, H. What is Zero Knowledge Encryption?. (2021,11,30). https://www.goanywhere.com/blog/what-is-zero-knowledge-encryption

4. https://blockwallet.io/technology.html

5. https://www.aleo.org/