“But [these] proofs have created a whole world of connection.” Zero-knowledge proofs belong to a category known as interactive proofs, so to learn how the former work, it helps to understand the latter.The prover could answer one or two questions correctly simply by luck, so it takes a large enough number of challenges, all of which the prover must get right, for the verifier to become confident that the prover does in fact know the statement is true.This idea of interactions came when Micali and Goldwasser — then graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley — puzzled through the logistics of playing poker over a network.The three researchers found that, if truly secure encryption is possible, then the solution to every problem in NP can also be proved with a zero-knowledge proof.This theoretically meant that zero-knowledge proofs don’t have to be interactive, which would imply that constant communication between two parties isn’t necessary."