Podcast episode ideas

This might be a good place to start collecting additional episode ideas. Especially since other participants can leave likes for the ones they want to hear.

Quick ask: don’t pitch yourself, always suggest a topic and another speaker

3 Likes

I really would like to see Jason Teutsch founder of Truebit on the show as project is a bit of an enigma atm. They seemed to lost the first mover advantage as well as remain in the background without providing much support to the dev wanting to build on it. Although there are rumors, especially after withdraw of 120mil$ from the treasury to revamp the offering and build a team.

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I’m curious to learn more about Mir and their approach to recursive snarks

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I agree that Mir is a good topic. They have a slightly different approach than Zexe as well for private computation which sounds interesting.

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Would like to hear more about progress on zkEVM by Hermez, in comparison with that of zkSync in their next update.

Maybe invite Jordi back on the show again, now that they have merged with Polygon, want to hear their big money big move. Or I think Barrywhitehat has also been working on zkEVM (their repo, their
WIP spec).

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Lol - nice front-run! We have zkEVM & Jordi on the show next week actually !

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This one might diverge from the usual podcasts, but… how about a really, really simple primer on zero-knowledge techniques and their uses? It could even focus on one canonical example and explain the assumptions, and really basic math that is behind them. (Like… really basic. But ideally it should be actionable, after listening?)

I think that would be amazing, imo, even if it’s a bit of a different target from the normal audience of the podcast!

EDIT: I guess the problem, imo, with a lot of the current zk literature is that much of it is illegible (sorry!) even though the underlying ideas are really not that complicated. Having someone really carefully walk you through the major points of a specific, if not super-modern, zk scheme and have you come out the other side of it with a really solid understanding of the basics, and ready to read some initial papers, say, would be incredible.

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The idea of a simple primer on zkps is great! Back in 2018, Fredrik and I did do an intro to zkps, but I have been thinking it might be cool to do an intro piece as a video.

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I think an episode about cryptographic assumptions would be really interesting. Or even more generally about provable security.

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Definitely second @guille ! I’m curious to learn about any developer tools & stack that is popular among those building applications using existing ZK libraries.

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I would like to suggest an episode about interoperability in general and interoperability and ZKPS. Seeing all the recent exploits on bridges I think it’s good to dive more into this. Bridges and privacy should also be interesting.

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For my second suggestion I would like to see an episode about Humanode. Their approach on a decentralized biometric identification layer is very interesting, it could also pave a way to mass adoption since it has the characteristics to be easy to use in daily life.

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I have noticed a lot of newcomers in the Telegram group lately, and together with the ZKP Resource list, it made me think: perhaps an episode explaining the different ZKP systems? SNARK, STARK, (Turbo)PLONK, HALO(2) … How do they compare? What are trade-offs? What are (cryptographic) security assumptions for each? In what context is some preferrable to another? That might be valuable.

Another idea: “What’s up with Fredrik?”! It might be great to have him back for an episode, give an update on what he has been up to, Polkadot …

Oh, and I support a Mir focused episode too :slight_smile:

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It would be wonderful if ECC’s scientists could make a Halo2 design episode, from top to down, e.g What’s Layout, Region, Cell? And compare to R1CS circuit library(such as bellman), what’s the thinking behind it?

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true. We did do a Halo 1 ep early last year. Would be a good time for a revisit!
https://zeroknowledge.fm/123-2/

Microsoft has a bunch of research into ZK protocols / tools, specially approaches w/o trusted setup, that I think wasn’t featured yet in the ZK podcast:

Those all contained innovative methods for the domain (reviving the SumCheck protocol, sparse polynomial representations, folding schemes …), but also a particular view of applications, as the people following this line of research at MSR are interested in general-purpose outsourced computation ([1][2][3] …).

Exploring the interplay of their field of application (not necessarily involving a blockchain) with the importance of a trustless protocol might prove interesting.

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I would like to hear and learn more about application-specific rollup as Layer 3 rollup, seeing Vitalik talked about and also many projects proposed this idea lately, eg. AltLayer and ZkSync. It would be great if we can invite these projects especially AltLayer as the guest.