Vitalik Buterin Sees 33% Chance of Near-Overhead Cryptography by 2030

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said he remains non-consensus bullish on the long-term outlook for cryptography. According to Foresight News, he said his so-called "Egyptian god protocol" — SNARK, FHE, and iO — has a 33% chance of reaching 1+ε overhead in everyday real-world computation. He said that at sufficiently large scale, the extra overhead from cryptography could become arbitrarily small relative to the cost of the original computation. According to Foresight News, Buterin also said there is a 60% chance that all three could achieve single-digit overhead, measured by energy use plus amortized computing power, meaning below 10x. Buterin said it is more likely that one of the three will be achieved before the end of this decade, with single-digit-overhead SNARKs the most likely. He added that specialized hash functions and some large-model inference are already close to that range.