From: waxwing/ AdamISZ <ekaggata@gmail.com>
To: Bitcoin Development Mailing List <bitcoindev@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [bitcoindev] A safe way to remove objectionable content from the blockchain
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2025 04:33:42 -0800 (PST) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <91a40bf7-fe9e-43a1-85d1-5889d4b31a7fn@googlegroups.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <aSxXEZzEAlfxLYlY@petertodd.org>
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(apologies to OP; we've drifted off topic here). Answers inline.
On Monday, December 1, 2025 at 5:36:55 AM UTC-3 Peter Todd wrote:
On Sat, Nov 29, 2025 at 05:54:13AM -0800, waxwing/ AdamISZ wrote:
> Hi Peter, list,
>
> Interesting!
>
> One thought that springs to mind: attempts to ameliorate IBD with ZKP
> should not forget one thing: what we actually want here is succinctness,
> and not so much ZK. Think SNARK instead of ZkSNARK.
> Which is important; without the requirement for an actual ZK property for
> the protocol, you can have it have attached witness that is not secret.
The Zero-Knowledge part is important to the goal in this specific use-case:
trying to prevent all arbitrary data publication.
Yes agreed. (with the strange caveat: the ZK property itself allows
data-embedding almost by force; the reason Schnorr has a data embedding
channel and BLS does not is precisely that BLS does not have a ZK property,
which itself relates to the fact that it's deterministic (think: no nonce =
no channel) .. the caveat is not super relevant to some kind of ZK-ed IBD
thing, though, since that's compressing an unfathomable amount).
<snip>
It's quite possible that ZKP's are, in the context of decentralized
blockchains, an exploit that will prove to be impossible to patch. Similar
to
how merge mining is an economic exploit that may well be impossible to
patch.
Sometimes seemingly good ideas are ultimately killed by clever exploits.
I have a sneaking suspicion you're wrong here, but I can't justify it.
(Hence 'interesting!'). Would love to hear others opinion on the topic.
> Take as contrast the opentimestamps model, where having proof
> that something was published, is the main functionality offered/required.
Nope. OpenTimestamps does not use proof of publication at all.
OpenTimestamps
is a commitment operation: proof that if A was changed, B would have to
change
too. The vast majority of OTS timestamps are for private data that is never
published in any way. OTS simply shows that data *existed*.
That seems like a good correction. So, tamper protection, using binding
property of commitments .. and "proof of existence" is *one* possible
function? Is that fair?
> I
> suppose there is another way to say it: the channel counterparty needs
> "proof of future publication" in contract setup. That's fair enough but
> it's a very different thing than getting a proof that something *was*
> published.
It is not a meaningfully different thing. An HTLC is proof that in the
event of
an uncooperative redemption, publication will happen. Slightly changing the
time it takes is irrelevant to the general concept.
Concretely: unless you can propose a technical innovation that somehow
turns
this pedantic nuance into a meaningfully different implementation, so what?
On reflection I don't see it as strange to make the distinction between the
two: 1/ proof that something was published in the past and 2/ proof that
conditional on event X occurring, data Y will be published. I guess 1/ is
just, most realistically, a case of publishing raw, unhashed data on a
blockchain, then the proof that that event occurred in the past is the
onchain txs ( using op_return or w/e) themselves. As you pointed out,
that's not what OTS is doing. Nor is it what an HTLC is doing, that's 2/.
--
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
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prev parent reply other threads:[~2025-12-02 13:05 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 13+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2025-11-20 1:57 Lazy Fair
2025-11-20 18:45 ` Greg Maxwell
2025-11-23 6:37 ` Saint Wenhao
2025-11-20 21:21 ` Ethan Heilman
2025-11-29 9:25 ` Peter Todd
2025-11-29 13:54 ` waxwing/ AdamISZ
2025-11-29 15:41 ` Erik Aronesty
2025-11-29 15:56 ` waxwing/ AdamISZ
2025-11-29 17:03 ` Erik Aronesty
2025-11-29 18:15 ` Greg Maxwell
2025-11-29 18:52 ` waxwing/ AdamISZ
2025-11-30 14:39 ` Peter Todd
2025-12-02 12:33 ` waxwing/ AdamISZ [this message]
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