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Stanford Cryptography Researchers Are Building Espresso, a Privacy-focused Blockchain 39

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: If blockchain technology is to reach true mass adoption, it will have to become cheaper and more efficient. Low transaction throughput on some of the most popular blockchains, most notably Ethereum, has kept gas fees high and hindered scalability. A host of new projects has cropped up to improve efficiency in the blockchain space, each with its own set of tradeoffs, including proof-of-capacity blockchain Subspace, which announced its $32.9 million Series A last week. Now, a team of researchers from Stanford University's applied cryptography research group has entered the fray. The team is coming out of stealth mode with Espresso, a new layer one blockchain they are building to allow for higher throughput and lower gas fees while prioritizing user privacy and decentralization. Espresso aims to optimize for both privacy and scalability by leveraging zero-knowledge proofs, a cryptographic tool that allows a party to prove a statement is true without revealing the evidence behind that statement, CEO Ben Fisch told TechCrunch in an interview.

Espresso Systems, the company behind the blockchain project, is led by Fisch, chief operating officer Charles Lu, and chief scientist Benedikt Banz, collaborators at Stanford who have each worked on other high-profile web3 projects, including the anonymity-focused Monero blockchain and BitTorrent co-founder Bram Cohen's Chia. They've teamed up with chief strategy officer Jill Gunter, a former crypto investor at Slow Ventures who is the fourth Espresso Systems co-founder, to take their blockchain and associated products to market. To achieve greater throughput, Espresso uses ZK-Rollups, a solution based on zero-knowledge proofs that allow transactions to be processed off-chain. ZK-Rollups consolidate multiple transactions into a single, easily-verifiable proof, thus reducing the bandwidth and computational load on the consensus protocol. The method has already gained popularity on the Ethereum blockchain through scaling solution providers like StarkWare and zkSync, according to Fisch.
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Stanford Cryptography Researchers Are Building Espresso, a Privacy-focused Blockchain More

Stanford Cryptography Researchers Are Building Espresso, a Privacy-focused Blockchain

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  • Now I know it's snakeoil.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. Web3 is not a solution for any of the problems it claims to be a solution to. Its only purpose is to make the crypto-"currency" scam last longer.

  • Kill it with fire before it spreads.

  • It does nothing useful for humanity.

    • It does nothing useful for humanity.

      I'd quibble that there are valid uses for blockchain technology. Anywhere that you have reason to distrust a supplier, blockchains can be used to provide better certainty about an item's provenance.

      Take something as simple as cobalt, for instance. Suppliers and manufacturers in the Western world are trying to avoid cobalt from mines that use child labor or engage in other questionable/unethical/illegal practices. If shipments are tied to the blockchain, it becomes possible to trace the shipment back to its

  • You don't need to know how or that it actually works just that it works. 'Zero Knowledge'.

    At this point blockchain should be an alert word to stay far away. Sort of like a safe word.

    -New ponzi of the week.

    • > At this point blockchain should be an alert word to stay far away. Sort of like a safe word.

      Agreed - or at least don't put any money or valuable resources into the whatever blockchain shit someone is trying really hard to sell you.

      > You don't need to know how or that it actually works just that it works. 'Zero Knowledge'.

      Zero knowledge proofs are a good thing. It simply means that I can prove to you that I know something (like the secret key for MIcriosoft.com), without revealing that secret to you.

      • So it works like a ssh key? Why don't they just say that.

        -pff BUZZwords.

        • > So it works like a ssh key?

          Yes, and SSH key would be another example of something that is *like *zero knowledge proofs. It's not QUITE zero knowledge, because the other side learns something. For practical purposes, it's essentially a zero knowledge proof. Actual zero knowledge algorithms have slightly higher security guarantees.

          In SSH public key authentication, the client sends to the server a signature over these bytes:

          string session identifier

  • The problem with any decentralized trust model, with the possible exception of proof of stake, is that to be decentralized it has to be expensive. Security is intrinsically linked to wasting resources processing, storage, or mining, refining, storing and protecting shiny metal.

      1. 1. Proof of Stake solves the efficiency problem, but at the cost of increasing the unfairness
      2. 2. At any time an investor is in the game, it can't be decentralized. As David Rosenthal put it [dshr.org]:

        If a system is to be decentralized, it has to have a low barrier to entry. If it has a low barrier to entry, competition will ensure it has low margins. Low margin businesses don't attract venture capital. VCs are pouring money into cryptocurrency and "web3" companies. This money is not going to build systems with low b

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Definitions are important. "Decentralized" as in, there's enough competition that it's hard for one entity (like a single government) to control, is different than the extremely naive vision some cryptocurrency advocates had of geeks running the world's financial system on their spare cycles while they weren't playing Counterstrike. Most cryptocurrency mining has a low barrier to entry, except bitcoin due to a flaw, and it's definitely going to have extremely low margins if it ever settles down to being an

  • So it runs a bit faster?

  • Yet another chain, and accompanying set of SHIT-COINS

    More privacy focused - Because these digital assets are not already so riddled with fraud the average Joe is best advised to just stay clear. Lets make certain the authorities can never straiten it out..

    More privacy focused - Because we don't already have major problems with these digital assets being used for money laundering, sanctions avoidance, tax fraud....

    Every major world government is going to be banning the shit out of these things in the near fu

    • Why so bitter?

      I know it must be hard to have thought yourself so smart that it would just be a passing fad.

      Probably even keep remembering back to that time you nearly put US$100 into Bitcoin, just to see, back in 2012.

      It's called 'sour grapes'. Go look it up. And get help.

  • "Privacy-focused" and "blockchain" are opposite concepts here. The whole point of the decentralized ledger is to be public.

  • This is interesting research but we are at a period in time where this is harmful research. Specifically, if such a thing became highly popular then it would be an even larger energy burden and thus result in even more pollution.

    When we reach the point of having excess amounts of energy then this might be something good but we aren't nearly there.

    • It's true that any proof-of-stake blockchain will be inherently anti-efficient due to coin mining regardless of how many megawatt-hours per block it takes, but even if we completely ignore the energy and equipment consumption issues, the work that this blockchain does would still be a net harm to society. Cryptocurrencies are used almost entirely for criminal finance and scams, they simply have far more utility for harm than good.

  • This is by design. There is no implementation that can fix that, you need a totally different approach.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      This is by design. There is no implementation that can fix that, you need a totally different approach.

      Indeed. That is why there are exchanges. But having those exchanges negates all the claimed advantages. The whole idea is non-fixable.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jd ( 1658 )

        I think you're right, it's unusable between individuals.

        Some archaeologists used blockchain to track artefacts since those are unique and can be described hierarchically, but I think they've given up. Besides, blockchain isn't suitable as the number of items to track is unknowable and the overhead is too high.

        It might be usable between banks. It depends. If there is a way to define the value of transactions such that the net of all transactions is a constant no matter how we increase the absolute value of a

  • So a bunch of students at Stanford want credits... (Score:3)

    by mmell ( 832646 ) on Monday March 07, 2022 @01:47PM (#62333791)
    ...for being hired by Yet Another bunch of VC types to work on another e-coin scam. From TFA:

    Espresso Systems, the company behind the blockchain project, is led by Fisch, chief operating officer Charles Lu, and chief scientist Benedikt Banz, collaborators at Stanford who have each worked on other high-profile web3 projects, including the anonymity-focused Monero blockchain and BitTorrent co-founder Bram Cohen's Chia. They've teamed up with chief strategy officer Jill Gunter, a former crypto investor at Slow Ventures who is the fourth Espresso Systems co-founder, to take their blockchain and associated products to market

    Espresso Systems wants to tell investors "We get our stuff from the brilliant guys at Stanford!". The kids (I'm guessing) get college cred for letting themselves be schnooked into internships with the latest pump-'n'-dump Ponzi opportunity. It's a win-win-lose situation, and I'll give the kids credit for this much: they're going to learn a lot very quickly, I'm guessing.

  • Given that there are 30 blockchains (consisting of one of 4 types: public blockchains, private blockchains, consortium blockchains and hybrid blockchain) I'm reminded of that xckcd #927 standards. [xkcd.com]

    On a related topic, there are over 9500 [coinmarketcap.com] cryptocurrencies being traded -- it sounds like this will be another chicken-and-egg problem. No one will use it because no else is using it.

  • Lower gas prices (gas meaning the transaction fees) are one thing, but what really would be nice would be a few features that may not bring the investors, but would ensure a level playing field:

    * A way that there can be a checkpoint done, and the blockchain pruned every so often. Bitcoin, you have to have the entire blockchain and parse it, or used a trusted parsing server to ensure you don't get double-spent. The ability to prune stuff so a condom bought five years ago isn't something everyone using the

    • some way of doing something like protein folding or SETI at home for currency.

      An AWS-like cloud system where proof-of-work is web storage, processing, and hosting. That way instead of resources being wasted, they are used to run+sustain the cloud hosting network

  • The problem with privacy coins like monero isn't throughput as in the number of transactions per block but the fact you can't create a list of unspent wallets. You can't tell which wallet a spend comes from in a privacy coin so you have to (essentially) check against every transaction that has ever come before. As the number of transactions increase it become nearly impossible to validate transactions in real time. If they have solved that problem then they have a product worth using.

    As a side note chec
  • This fact will take the shiny off: NTLM challenge response is a zero-knowledge proof algorithm.

  • Has there ever been one of these blockchain projects that actually got used as intended and not just as another crypto currency?

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