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Vitalik Buterin says advanced cryptography could become far cheaper

Buterin pegged a 60% probability that SNARKs, fully homomorphic encryption, and indistinguishability obfuscation fall below 10 times the cost of ordinary computation, with at least one, likely SNARKs, reaching single-digit overhead by decade end.

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Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said there is a 60% chance that advanced cryptography will become cheap enough to reshape privacy on Ethereum. In remarks published Sept. 6, he tied the odds to SNARKs, fully homomorphic encryption, and indistinguishability obfuscation, saying they could eventually run at less than 10 times the cost of ordinary computation.

Buterin also estimated a 33% chance that all three technologies could approach near-zero additional overhead at sufficient scale. He emphasized the timeline is more cautious than the headline odds suggest, saying there is a good chance that at least one, probably SNARKs, reaches single-digit overhead by the end of the decade.

The Ethereum roadmap, as Buterin described it, separates privacy into private reads, private writes, and private proving so progress in one area does not depend on every cryptographic primitive becoming cheap at the same time. He pointed to other privacy-building components such as anonymous RPC systems, private information retrieval, oblivious RAM, and light clients.

Buterin noted that even with private transactions, privacy can be weakened by practical constraints such as censorship before inclusion and linkage through fee payer data or correlations from sequential account nonces. He referenced research proposals including frame transactions, inclusion lists, and keyed nonces, and said existing Ethereum patterns can already support uses like anonymous voting, private claims, and shielded withdrawals, though privacy can still leak through wallet reuse, RPC providers, public inputs, or weak anonymity sets.

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