Hello Noir! [Part 1]

ZK is a hot topic. But what does it even mean to build a ZK circuit? Let's build a barebone, super basic circuit so you can have a better understanding what its part of. 1. What we're building and the toolchain What we're building through this series is a SNARK - a Succinct Non-interactive Argument of Knowledge. Barretenberg, the proving backend we'll use, implements UltraHonk - a PLONK-based proof system. PLONK and its descendants are SNARKs. The zero-knowledge part is actually optional (Barretenberg has a --zk flag for that), so what we produce is strictly a SNARK, not necessarily a zkSNARK - but the ecosystem loosely calls everything "zk" since the tooling supports it. Here's the high-level flow of what we're doing: We, the prover (the user), want to prove something - some statement, like "I am more than 20 years old" We do this by supplying evidence that backs our statement - a blob of bytes, mathematically encoding our proof in a privacy-friendly way Another party, the verifier, c