Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin has made some cryptographic predictions for the 2020s.
Vitalik in a post on his Twitter handle reminisced on the megatrend in the 2010s, saying the megatrend in cryptography of that period was characterized by elliptic curves, pairings, and general-purpose ZKPs/SNARKs.
Predicting what will happen in the 2020s, the respected programmer said the megatrend of this period will be lattices, LWE, multilinear maps, homomorphic encryption, MPC, and obfuscation. These predictions, he said will be added to the adoption of the 2010s cryptographic megatrend.
Vitalik said what is peculiar to the two periods is the increased usage of cryptographic primitives which operate over arithmetic and Boolean circuits as a mathematical representation of computation.
Noting that the cryptographic constructions will be a general-purpose this period, Vitalik when asked how Chainlink fits into the megatrend said with obfuscation, there is a chance to authenticate HTTPS responses ie. data from websites without necessarily using trusted hardware.
Decentralized Court, Ethereum co-Founder Weighs In
Earlier, the founder of Ethereum had spoken about a paper on blockchain smart contracts for arbitration, published by both Hitoshi Matsushima and Shunya Noda. The published paper opens the world to great ideas on settling legal issues without the deployment of a legal procedure.
Paper from Hitoshi Matsushima and Shunya Noda on blockchain-based smart contract for arbitration (or what I’ve earlier called “decentralized courts”):https://t.co/sDavIEPsFf
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) April 10, 2020
The paper implements blockchain technology ideas of saving loads of information without giving rooms to manipulation.
Professor Hitoshi Matsushima is from the Department of Economics, University of Tokyo, while Professor Shunya Noda is from the Vancouver School of Economics, a section of the University of British Columbia, Canada.
The paper digs dip on smart contracts, removing the central administration while opening a room for its usage in the legal field. At the time of writing, the idea has not been implemented whatsoever.
The paper makes it clear that a self-enforcing mechanism that does not depend on a trusted third party or a long-term relationship is possible using blockchain technology.
Arguably the innovation is a digital court written on the blockchain technology. The digital court is capable of punishing agents that default on the basic agreement.
The applicability of Ethereum smart contracting makes the network good for the digital court. And hopefully, Vitalik is thinking of delving into this idea.