Bulletproofs - a Crypto Gunfight at the OK Corral

It would be trivial to state that a lot happened in the last few months. Provably as a product was thought of, designed, implemented and released in its Alpha version just a few days ago. We also met clients, investors and friends that gave us a lot of feedback. But it cannot be ignored that, in Warsaw, Poland, I met and was welcomed by a vibrant community of engineers, cryptographers, academics (thank you Stefan) and tech entrepreneurs (hats off Marek and Oreste) that work in the zero knowledge and verifiable computing space and congregate at the ZKWarsaw meetups.

Among them, I met Rafal Kilch. Rafal gave a presentation on cryptographic commitments that lead to a very interesting technical discussion about Bulletproofs. Provably Alpha relies heavily on Bulletproofs. It does so because it fulfills the needs of Verifiable Analytics on Relational Databases (the same is not necessarily true for other zero knowledge general frameworks) but also because it is a mature publicly known protocol that has been robustly and reputably implemented and maintained in open source for relatively many years (2016 to 2024 is a long time in cryptography!).

So Rafal and I got inspired to write a peculiar blog. We thought of using a dialectic match as an engaging way to explain Bulletproofs and why they’re important in the current zero-knowledge landscape, even though they don’t get much attention. The characters in the dialogue are inspired by the 1957 American Western, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. This classic film, starring Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday, is loosely based on a real-life gunfight between lawmen and cowboys in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881.

You can find the blog in Rafal substack here.