wtf is reverie?

Reverie is a cryptography toolkit that lets someone prove they know a secret without revealing what that secret is. This concept is called a "zero-knowledge proof." The project implements a specific academic approach from 2018 that is designed to be fast and practical, aiming to provide 128 bits of standard security. It is written in the Rust programming language. In everyday terms, imagine you want to prove to a bouncer that you are over 21 without actually showing your driver's license or revealing your exact birthday. Zero-knowledge proofs allow a computer to do something similar. A "prover" generates a mathematical argument that a statement is true, and a "verifier" checks that argument. This project provides the tools for both sides of that exchange. It offers a library for programmers to integrate into their own software, as well as a command-line tool for quickly experimenting with proving and verifying statements. The main audience for this project includes cryptography researchers, security engineers, and developers building advanced privacy systems or post-quantum digital signatures. Because it is designed to be highly efficient, it is particularly useful for proving complex mathematical statements quickly. It works with different mathematical structures called "rings," and it is tuned to work fastest with specific types of data. The README does not go into detail on the exact use cases, but the core benefit is generating these proofs without the long waiting times that older methods require. The project is built to maximize performance. It takes advantage of specialized hardware instructions available on modern computer processors to speed up the math. It also uses clever optimization tricks, like packing multiple instances of a calculation into a single piece of data to process them all at once. This focus on speed makes it notable, as zero-knowledge proofs are notoriously slow and computationally heavy, and this project attempts to make them more practical for real-world use.