Blockchain at Berkeley
Blockchain at Berkeley
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Solana – Speed, Scalability… Security?
Among modern layer-one blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, honesty and legitimacy come at the cost of efficiency. On the Bitcoin blockchain, miners first compete in a guess-and-check race to compute a hash lower than a target value. Then, validator nodes confirm this hash and converge on the correct block ordering. This process, which implements a Proof-of-Work mechanism, is wildly inefficient. To allow miners enough time to complete their task, target hashes are set such that forming a block takes miners approximately 10 minutes on average. This is the issue that Solana and its elegant Proof-of-History (PoH) solves.
ZERO-KNOWLEDGE PROOFS
Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) are a game-changing cryptographic tool that enables one party to prove to another that they have certain information, all without revealing the information itself. By using a proof where the validator verifies the truthiness of a statement without revealing the underlying data, ZKPs make it possible to create anonymous and private transactions on public blockchain, while maintaining their privacy and keeping their sensitive information secure.