While many Bitcoiners remain hopeful the network will embrace zero-knowledge proofs for protocol-level use cases, practical adoption has remained limited outside of BitVM and a handful of experimental proposals.

Most of the world’s ZKP research has circled around Ethereum and other ecosystems, where significant resources have been dedicated to advancing these systems, particularly for scaling and privacy applications.

One of the most notable contributors to this research is Benedikt Bünz — professor of cryptography at NYU and collaborator of Dan Boneh, who together inarguably form one of the strongest blockchain-applied cryptography teams in the world.

The pair recently announced they’ll be leading the new post-quantum cryptography unit localhost research — the first dedicated PQ research effort within a major Bitcoin development organization.

With Benedikt leading the charge on the use of zero-knowledge proofs for post-quantum mitigation, the question emerges: will the post-quantum transition be the catalyst to finally bring zero-knowledge proofs to Bitcoin's core protocol?

In more details, Benedikt and I discuss:

• Why ZKPs haven’t been widely adopted by the Bitcoin technical community — and why the threat of quantum computers may change that posture going forward
• How ZKPs could be used for signature batching to address larger post-quantum signatures in Bitcoin’s post-quantum era
• Why Bitcoiners will likely prioritize hash-based signatures as an initial post-quantum scheme — rather than more efficient but less proven alternatives (e.g. lattice-based)
• How ZKPs have evolved over the last decade and may finally be ready for Bitcoin’s strict requirements around trust assumptions
• Why Benedikt and Dan are teaming up with localhost research to create the first post-quantum cryptography unit within a major Bitcoin development organization + what they hope to accomplish

This episode of Bitcoin Rails is brought to you by:

LayerTwo Labs — developing research, software, and technologies for scaling Bitcoin via the integration of Drivechains (BIP 300/301)

Hashi on Sui Network — a primitive for executing Bitcoin DeFi transactions, without having to trust a federated bridge or other centralized entity

BitBox — an open-source Bitcoin-only hardware wallet, with smooth UX and no compromises on security. Check out Bitbox [dot] swiss and use code BITCOINRAILS to get a discount