Mina Protocol

@syedaliahmed how is this possible?

@chrismessina Hey Chris, I’ve tagged the founders hopefully they can shed some light.

@chrismessina From their website: “Mina offers an elegant solution: replacing the blockchain with an easily verifiable, consistent-sized cryptographic proof. Mina dramatically reduces the amount of data each user needs to download. Instead of verifying the entire chain from the beginning of time, participants fully verify the network and transactions using recursive zero knowledge proofs (or zk-SNARKs). Nodes can then store just this proof, as opposed to the entire chain. And because it’s a consistent size, Mina stays accessible and can be trustlessly accessed from any device — even as it scales to millions of users and accumulates years of transaction data.”

@syedaliahmed got it, thanks! A bit over my head, but I get the gist. Seems like maybe this isn't accurate then? "their entire blockchain is and will always be the size of a few tweets" Seems like users just have to store/verify something like a crytographic checksum, but the entire blockchain is still stored somewhere, and is much larger than a few tweets, no?

@chrismessina I don’t know much about their tech but it does sound like an elegant solution. May be too good to be true, but we’ll have to see how things play out after their launch. From their website: “But how do zk-SNARKs work? They capture the state of the entire blockchain as a lightweight snapshot and send that around — instead of the chain itself. It’s like sending your friend a postcard of an elephant, instead of a massive live animal. When the next block in the network is created, it takes a snapshot of itself — with the snapshot of the previous state of the blockchain as the background. That new snapshot will in turn be used as the backdrop for the next block, and so on and so on. Rather amazingly, while it can contain proof of an infinite amount of information, the snapshot always remains the same size.”