A proof that 0 = 1, in a real zk-VM

A zero-knowledge VM makes one promise to a verifier: I ran the program whose hash is H, on this input, and got this output, and here is a proof you can check without re-running anything. The whole edifice rests on it being computationally infeasible to find a different program with the same hash. In December 2022 I built a Miden Assembly program that outputs a stack of zeros, together with a valid…