Have you ever thought about how you can prove that you know a secret in the digital world without revealing it? It sounds like magic, but this is the miracle that Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) are achieving. It is not only a breakthrough in cryptography, but also the key to privacy and efficiency in our digital lives. Recently, the Ethereum Foundation announced an ambitious technical strategy: they want to make 99% of the blocks complete proof within 10 seconds, keep the hardware cost below $100,000, and the energy consumption no more than 10 kilowatts. At the same time, Vitalik Buterin is also thinking about how to use zero-knowledge proofs to solve the fundamental problem of digital identity. What kind of revolutionary significance is hidden behind these seemingly technical breakthroughs? The logic behind the magic: What exactly is zero-knowledge proof? Let me explain with a simple example. Imagine you have a color-blind friend, and you have two balls in your hand, one red and one green. You want to prove to your friend that the colors of the two balls are indeed different, but you don't want to tell him which one is red and which one is green. You can do this: 1. Let your friend look at the two balls, and then you hide the balls behind your back 2. Your friend randomly decides whether to swap the positions of the two balls 3. You take the balls out again, and your friend asks you: "Did I swap them?" 4. You can accurately answer "yes" or "no" If the two balls are the same color, you can only guess, with an accuracy rate of only 50%. But if the colors are different, you can always give the correct answer. After repeating this process many times, your friend will be sure that the two balls are different colors, but still don't know which color is which. This is the essence of zero-knowledge proof: proving a fact (the balls are different colors) without revealing any additional information (the specific color). Ethereum's new ambition: making blockchain as fast as the speed of light Now let's put this concept into the world of blockchain. Ethereum faces a huge challenge: every transaction needs to be verified by all nodes, just like a busy bank, every transfer must be rechecked by all tellers. This leads to network congestion and high fees. Zero-knowledge proof provides an elegant solution: zkEVM (zero-knowledge Ethereum virtual machine). Imagine now that this bank hired a super-efficient internal auditor. This auditor could process thousands of transactions and then generate a very concise report: "All 10,000 transactions I processed were valid." The bank's main system only needs to verify this one report, rather than rechecking every transaction. This is how zkEVM works. It processes a large number of transactions "off-chain" and then submits a compact zero-knowledge proof to the Ethereum mainnet that all of these transactions are valid. The technical indicators set by the Ethereum Foundation show the maturity of this technology: - 99% of the blocks are proven within 10 seconds : This means almost instant transaction confirmation - Hardware cost is less than $100,000 : Allow more validators to participate - Energy consumption is no more than 10 kilowatts : Approximately equivalent to the power conumption of several high-performance computers These numbers may seem technical, but they represent a turning point: zero-knowledge proof has moved from the laboratory to practical use. New possibilities for digital identity: You are you, but no one knows who you are The application of zero-knowledge proof is far more than improving blockchain efficiency. Vitalik's recent thinking reveals another important direction: digital identity system. Traditional identity verification is like showing your ID card to a nightclub. T