Vitalik Buterin Advocates for Enhanced Metrics in Cryptographic Computing

According to Foresight News, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has expressed a desire for more researchers in zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) to provide the time ratio between encrypted and original computations. This metric, which compares the time taken for encrypted computations to that of original computations, offers a more hardware-independent and valuable insight than merely stating the number of operations per second (N ops) that can be performed. It helps in understanding the efficiency trade-offs when using cryptographic techniques instead of relying on trust. Buterin acknowledges the challenges in calculating this ratio due to the heterogeneous nature of operations between execution and proof, particularly concerning SIMD/parallelization and memory access patterns. Despite these complexities and the partial hardware dependency of the ratio, he believes that the overhead factor remains a valuable indicator for developers. This is because developers typically know the time required for original computations, allowing them to easily estimate the impact of encryption by performing simple multiplication.