Vitalik Buterin says crypto’s most powerful idea is still nowhere near ready
The Ethereum co-founder says indistinguishability obfuscation could one day act like a “trustless trusted third party,” but today’s versions remain far too slow for real use.
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Summary
- Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is publishing a technical series on program obfuscation, which he calls the most powerful idea in cryptography even though it is far from practical use.
- Obfuscation, and specifically indistinguishability obfuscation, aims to hide how code works rather than the data it processes, potentially acting as a kind of trustless trusted third party when paired with a blockchain.
- While recent research shows iO can be built under reasonable assumptions, current implementations are so slow as to be unusable, leaving obfuscation at a research milestone stage rather than anywhere near production, unlike existing privacy tools such as Monero.
