Bloom Filters, Merkle Trees and … Accumulators
I really miss Meetups and physical conferences. To me, the online versions of these events, just do not work, especially related to Meetups.
Why? Because these are places to meet up with people with ideas and vision, and to share thoughts. The current pandemic has thus restricted the opportunities for innovators to engage with others, and get feedback (and meet potential investors, too).
It was at one of these Meetups a few years ago, that I pitched the idea of commitments and proofs as part of a trusted system. My use case was quite trivial, and based on a real-life event of someone making a bet on a football match. For this, they took odds of a team winning a match (and who were already 2–0 up with a fairly short time to go), and where they ended up winning the bet. But, the betting company said that the odds were a mistake, and refused to payout. To me, this is was unfair, and a better approach might have been that the person and the betting company should have entered into a binding (smart) contract, and where it is possible to make a commitment to the bet, and then reveal it after the event:
