Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin puts 60% odds on a cryptography breakthrough that could weaken Wall Street middlemen

Vitalik Buterin sees a 60% chance that advanced cryptography becomes cheap enough to reshape Ethereum privacy.

On Sept. 6, the Ethereum co-founder said there is a 60% probability that SNARKs, fully homomorphic encryption and indistinguishability obfuscation will eventually operate at less than 10 times the cost of ordinary computation. He put the odds at 33% that all three could approach near-zero additional overhead at sufficient scale.

The forecast reaches well beyond hiding transactions.

Cheap SNARKs could make private proofs easier to generate. Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) could let applications compute directly on encrypted data. Indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) aims to let software run without exposing its internal logic.

Together, the technologies could move privacy from a specialized feature toward a default layer for financial and computational systems.

Buterin’s timeline is more cautious than the probability headline suggests. He said there is a good chance that at least one of the three, probably SNARKs, reaches single-digit overhead by the end of the decade. He did not assign a probability to that specific deadline.

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