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Honestly the hash chain in ssb has felt somewhat like overkill to me. If a message is signed, that should prove authenticity, assuming the private key is private. Interesting though, using social proof in this way.

The merkle list gets us a verifiable order of messages, which is nice, but not necessary for the gossip protocol.

Yeah fair, I think a) I wanted to make a client that was compatible with the SSB protocol but see how I could extend it in a backwards compatible way b) zk proofs are cool and I wanted to play with them Maybe hashchain is more useful for certain types of apps atop SSB vs. simple msgs (ex: git)?

I agree that it's overkill, and also what makes ssb ssb. It is helpful to provide hashlink references in a proto tho. I made a signing only (kinda like Nostr NIP-1) version of bogbook and ended up having to compare every hashlink in the db between peers to sync an entire feed.

Also, in Nostr Nip-01 and atproto we should keep in mind it is possible to fake messages in the past. Which is harder to get away with in classic ssb.

imo it's nice to know that you're receiving ALL of your friend's messages and that the middleman peers aren't omitting anything for their own questionable purposes

@bnewbold.net @snarfed.org idk if either of you would have any ideas about this: so messages in secure scuttlebutt are part of a hashchain (message n signed using n-1 etc), so the protocol won't gossip orphans to avoid spam/fake data. I was trying to think about zk proofs 1/

2/ to safely propagate the orphaned message b/c what if the receiver Alice never sees anything other than message n-i from Bob. You could have a zk proof that says I prove that this message n-i is part of a chain w/ Bob's gensis signature but idk if that is any better than the normal mode.

3/ b/c just putting Bob's genesis hash in the 1 off message in a QR code doesn't really mean anything? Also if you had all of Bob's messages eventually than what is the point? So I thought what if we use Bob's social network? Include in the proof evidence of Bob following some people.