Author: Sergio Demian Lerner 2016-02-26 23:06:40
Published on: 2016-02-26T23:06:40+00:00
Gregory Maxwell, a member of the Bitcoin-dev community, announced a successful transaction using the Zero-Knowledge Contingent Payment (ZKCP) on the Bitcoin network. This transaction protocol enables a buyer to purchase information from a seller using Bitcoin in a private and secure manner, where both parties do not need to trust each other or depend on arbitration by a third party. The expected information is transferred only if the payment is made. This type of sale is irreversible, potentially crosses multiple jurisdictions and involves parties whose financial stability is uncertain, meaning that both parties either take a great deal of risk or have to make difficult arrangements. ZKCP avoids significant transactional costs involved in such sales which can otherwise easily go wrong. In this particular transaction, Gregory purchased a solution to a 16x16 Sudoku puzzle for 0.10 BTC from Sean Bowe, a member of the Zcash team, as part of a demonstration performed live at Financial Cryptography 2016 in Barbados. The transfer involved two transactions. Almost all of the engineering work behind this ZKCP implementation was done by Sean Bowe, with support from Pieter Wuille, Gregory Maxwell, and Madars Virza. The property of the SKCP system is that the person who performed the trusted setup cannot extract any information from a proof, meaning it is proven hard to obtain information from a proof by the buyer. Further technical details about ZKCP implementation are available at https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/02/26/zero-knowledge-contingent-payments-announcement/.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T04:10:37.922220+00:00