Articles like this are why I visit HN - most days HN feels like the equivalent of quickly skimming my email inbox - but every once in a while there's a gem like this article that moves me deeply
it’s similar to how you can hash passwords to know that the user knows it without knowing the password. so you don’t know the amounts you just know that, for example, the output (debit) is affordable by the sender (in the case of a payment). the sort of “magic” of zk systems lies in the part where you can turn complex programs into something similar by converting them into polynomials. it turns out that pretty much any program can be represented as polynomial math and the second magical part is that although the proofs might be expensive to compute, they can be verified in constant time (in the case of a SNARK at least).
