Wu said that Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published an article stating that obfuscation is the most powerful primitive conceived in cryptography, capable of converting a program into an "encrypted program" that, while hiding internal logic, produces the same plaintext output for plaintext inputs as the original program; its canonical form is indistinguishability obfuscation (iO), which essentially hides code rather than data. Vitalik noted that obfuscation is very close to the theoretical ideal of a universal "trustless trusted third party," and when combined with blockchain, it can support applications such as secure, private, and collusion-resistant voting systems with almost no trust assumptions; however, obfuscated programs cannot prevent themselves from being copied and cannot independently handle stateful scenarios like currency, but blockchain can fill this gap. The article points out that in recent years, researchers have been able to achieve iO under reasonable security assumptions, but the runtime remains "galactic," potentially exceeding the age of the universe, and is far from practical application. Vitalik stated that future paths include optimizing existing lattice-based constructions, adopting more aggressive cryptographic lattice assumptions, or exploring entirely new obfuscation schemes that do not rely on lattices; if successful, any protocol describable by an idealized trusted third party could be securely realized, but enormous challenges remain.

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SushiStopLoss

· 6h ago

Waiting for a non-grid solution; currently, the efficiency of going on-chain is like burning money for fun.

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FlamingoFrontView

· 10h ago

If the lattice assumption can be broken, privacy computing will truly change drastically.

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GateUser-04e4dac2

· 10h ago

So the core contradiction is: it works but it's slow to the end of the universe?

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SlippageSamurai

· 10h ago

The concept of iO is too hardcore, the galactic running time directly discourages people.

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Vitalik: Combining obfuscation with blockchain can get close to a “trustworthy third party without needing trust,” but it is still far from practical.

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