Buterin Sees 60% Chance for Crypto to Reach '1+ε' Efficiency

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has made an optimistic prediction about the future of cryptography. In a recent tweet, he stated that there is a 60% chance that three advanced cryptographic techniques - SNARK, FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption), and iO (Indistinguishability Obfuscation) - will be able to implement general-purpose computations at a cost less than 10 times the normal computation.

Buterin also estimated that there is a 33% chance that these three technologies can achieve an even more efficient level, where the overhead of applying cryptography is negligible, or '1+ε' times the original computation. However, he clarified that this prediction does not come with a specific timeline and is still a personal and non-consensus view.

Buterin pointed out that SNARK has already achieved an overhead of less than 10 times in some specialized applications, such as dedicated hash functions or LLM (Large Language Model) inference. He also mentioned that he considers these three technologies to be 'Egyptian God Protocols', a term he coined earlier this year.

Interestingly, Buterin noted that there is a significant difference in the maturity level of these three technologies, with iO being particularly inefficient according to his own estimates.