Vitalik: Hopes ZK and FHE researchers provide computation efficiency ratios instead of just computation speed

Foresight News reported that Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that he hopes more researchers in zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) can provide the time ratio between encrypted computation and raw computation—that is, the ratio of encrypted computation time to raw computation time—instead of only providing the number of operations that can be executed per second (N ops). This ratio is more hardware-independent and can provide more valuable information: when using cryptographic techniques instead of trust-based approaches, how much efficiency am I sacrificing? In addition, for developers, such a ratio is easier to estimate, as developers usually already know the time required for raw computation and can directly perform multiplication.

Although he acknowledged that this is difficult because the required operations are heterogeneous between execution and proof, especially in terms of SIMD/parallelization and memory access patterns, so even the ratio to some extent depends on hardware, he believes that despite these shortcomings, the overhead factor is still a valuable metric.