Buterin Predicts 60% Chance for Cryptography Breakthrough to Weaken Wall Street Middlemen

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has expressed confidence in the potential of advanced cryptography to reshape Ethereum privacy and weaken Wall Street middlemen. In a recent statement, he assigned a 60% probability that technologies like SNARKs, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) will eventually operate at less than 10 times the cost of ordinary computation.

The breakthrough could have far-reaching implications for financial and computational systems. SNARKs would enable private proofs to be generated more easily, while FHE would allow applications to compute directly on encrypted data. iO aims to conceal the program itself, allowing users to execute software without exposing its underlying logic.

Buterin's timeline is cautious, but he believes that at least one of these technologies could reach single-digit overhead by the end of the decade. He also notes that Ethereum can improve privacy before a universal cryptographic cost collapse occurs through separate technologies like anonymous RPC systems and private information retrieval.