Building secure obfuscation has proven brutally difficult. An ideal version was proven impossible in 2001, sending researchers after the fainter iO target instead, an effort of about two decades filled with broken attempts. The latest good news is that iO can now be built under reasonable security assumptions.
The downside, however, is that run times are, in Buterin’s words, “galactic”, efficient on paper but absurdly slow in practice.
Buterin compared the moment to where SNARKs, the zero-knowledge proofs now central to Ethereum’s scaling, sat around 2010, before years of optimization turned them from a curiosity into a working infrastructure. The suggestion is that blurring can travel the same path from theoretical breakthrough to useful tool, even though a single run today would be hopelessly expensive.
Privacy coins like Monero (XMR) already hide things on a live blockchain, so why is Buterin treating this as unsolved? Because they hide different things. Monero hides transaction data, such as who paid whom and how much, through ring signatures, stealth addresses and confidential amounts.
Obfuscation in Buterin’s sense hides the logic of the program, the code itself, not the data flowing through it. As he puts it, iO hides the code, not the data. Monero has made transactions private for over a decade, but program obfuscation has never run in production anywhere, and closing that gap is what his post is about.
