🪑 Session chair: Jan (Duties: Read material above-average carefully 🤓; prepare fallback discussions/questions (worst-case: just prepare some quiz questions about the material) 🙋. Prepare a few slides to guide the session through subtopics (this is not supposed to be a detailed summary of the material)
✍️ Notetaker: Jan (Duties: Take notes during the session, push them to the wiki afterwards 📝. Moderate to get input for the wiki pages 🧠. Make people summarize / dumb down discussion results to keep things comprehensible for everyone 🧑⚖️.)
🎯 Goals
Our goal is to understand (the main ideas of) the Nova proof system. Secondarily, let’s quickly go over Section 1 in this blog post. Be able to answer the following questions:
- What is a Folding Scheme, formally?
- How is it different from a proof system?
- How do we understand its properties?
- How do you get from Folding Scheme to IVC?
- What’s that “I’ve folded correctly” proof business and how complicated is that to prove?
- What’s the performance benefit over recursive SNARKs?
- (Is there magic happening with Relaxed R1CS or is that just a boring technical thing?)
📚 Material
- An incomplete guide to Folding
- Section 1 (general IVC overview) for context.
- Section 2 (Nova)
- Nova paper
- Whiteboard session (video)
- (+ … whatever resource you find most appropriate)
📝 Notes
Jan 16 session
- Formal definition of a Folding Scheme
- Relaxed R1CS
- Performance benefit over recursive SNARKs: much more efficient combination, only linear combination over the field. No “SNARK proof of correct hash” (at least not a complicated one)
Jan 23 session
Focus:
- how to build IVC from folding
- Why is IVC interesting?