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How "mental poker" led to zero-knowledge proofs
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How a poker problem led to one of cryptography’s most powerful ideas: proving a claim without revealing anything else. Shafi Goldwasser recounts how a seemingly playful problem — playing “mental poker” securely over the phone — led her and Silvio Micali toward a much deeper idea: proving that something is true without revealing the hidden information behind it. Solving that problem required rethinking the very definition of a proof. Proofs could be interactive. They could tolerate an extremely small probability of error. And they could guarantee that the verifier learns nothing beyond the truth of the claim itself. Those ideas became the foundations of zero-knowledge proofs — and introduced the simulation paradigm that remains central to how zero knowledge is defined today. Links Shafi Goldwasser: Tim Roughgarden:
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Analysis last updated August 25, 2026 · Read the methodologyRead the creator’s original video description
How a poker problem led to one of cryptography’s most powerful ideas: proving a claim without revealing anything else. Shafi Goldwasser recounts how a seemingly playful problem — playing “mental poker” securely over the phone — led her and Silvio Micali toward a much deeper idea: proving that something is true without revealing the hidden information behind it. Solving that problem required rethinking the very definition of a proof. Proofs could be interactive. They could tolerate an extremely small probability of error. And they could guarantee that the verifier learns nothing beyond the truth of the claim itself. Those ideas became the foundations of zero-knowledge proofs — and introduced the simulation paradigm that remains central to how zero knowledge is defined today. Links Shafi Goldwasser: Tim Roughgarden: