SNARKs vs STARKs, without the mysticism. A SNARK needs a trusted setup: a one-time ceremony that generates secret randomness "toxic waste" which must then be destroyed. If one copy survives, proofs can be forged. The big ZK rollups of the first era, zkSync Era, Scroll, Polygon zkEVM, all shipped SNARK-based proving. Every one of them ran a setup ceremony you had to trust. Multi-party rituals dilute the risk ("safe as long as one participant was honest"). The assumption never leaves. A STARK needs no ceremony. No toxic waste, nothing to destroy, nothing to trust. Security reduces to collision-resistant hash functions, the same primitive your wallet already depends on. And with no elliptic-curve pairings in the loop, STARKs are plausibly quantum-resistant. The honest reason SNARKs won the first era: smaller proofs, cheaper to verify on Ethereum. Miden's bet: verification moves to your device anyway, where proof size barely matters but the trust assumption does. One question to ask of any ZK system: what does the proof need me to trust? If the answer includes a ceremony, you're trusting people, not math. @0xMiden VM is STARK-based. You trust the hash function. That's the whole list.