Where you spend can have an impact on a decision… e.g. you may have the income and savings but if you’re regularly spending on gambling that can be a red flag.
If the loan assessment criteria are objective, they can be quantified.
The basic concept here is: ZKP lets you prove arbitrary statements.
Instead of:
Here is entire bank history, you decide.
You can say:
Had a fixed income above $X for 12 months.
Had a surplus of $X after fixed expenses in the last 3 months.
Did not buy anything irregular above $1000 in the last 3 months.
"Did not gamble" is a moral judgement. Who knows, maybe I'm buying gum at the local casino, is that gambling? Maybe I'm tossing a coin every night after work as to whether I should drive in the opposite lane, is that not gambling? You can only objectively measure financially risky behavior in statistical terms.
Think of a ZK proof as a program that can take both public and private knowledge as input, and produce public and private knowledge as output.
This is what seems magical to me: A program with secret input. You can't run the program to verify that my execution of the program is correct, but you can verify a proof that I ran the program with input you didn't have.
The way private knowledge works is through cryptographic commitments.
For example, the bank may start by giving you a signed, structured document with your transactions.
You can then feed their signature and the document to your program, and produce any derivation.
You can use the MCCs of each tx, then generating a zk-proof that shows none of the MCCs in your account match restricted categories.
This requires cooperation from the "bank", ideally providing Merkle trees to make sure no tx is missing in the proof like it would be for a blockchain-based solution.
This is a testing and deployment issue rather than coding... mistakes and bugs happen - but most serious businesses have routines setup to catch them before rolling them out globally!
I’m sure even in the fictional worlds of Star Trek and Expanse there’s still someone in their back yard with a telescope, despite the skies being filled with not just satellites, but the constant traffic of space ships and the oppressive presence of megastructures.
Sorry it wasn’t meant to come off as an accusation, more of a thought experiment: what would prove they would be successful in the job: proving they can solve a trivial problem in thirty minutes? I assume your team is not only solving the same trivial problems over and over again.
I do have an idea I suppose. Present them with a problem and a solution and have them lead a discussion of the merits of the solution, what alternatives they might propose and so on. There’s some issues to avoid with this approach tho, like presenting a pair with a correct response in mind and then judging people against that standard rather than the standard of “how are they thinking through this problem, the drawbacks and benefits, are they presenting their ideas effectively and respectfully, etc”
It also primes them to expect a certain sort of environment coming into the job, participating in meetings and collaborative solutions instead of just being a code cowboy. Adapt your specific discussion to how you expect them to conduct themselves, probably present your company collaboration guidelines and meeting CoC as a precursor to the meeting, idk I’m just spitballing here. I’ve struggled with this problem a lot hiring people.
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