zero-knowledge proofs are one of the most powerful tools cryptographers have ever devised. But unfortunately they're also relatively poorly understood. In this series of posts I'm going try to give a (mostly) non-mathematical description of what ZK proofs are, and what makes them so special. In this post and the next I'll talk about some of the ZK protocols we actually use.

2016-09-20: how do you inspect nuclear weapons without learning the secrets of their design? enter zero knowledge proofs.