[api]

Tangential but:

As a cyberpunk hippie who thinks people should own their data and control their computers (personal comput-ing regardless of form factor), that's why I focus mostly on the transport and the cloud. The cloud is where your data mostly lives today and probably will live even more in the future, and having private transport envelopes to get that data to and from your multiple devices is key. In the long term I'm excited about personal cloud devices and homomorphic encryption, which would enable your own cloud resources to be hosted in commodity cloud data centers without compromising security. The next "PC" will really be a kind of amorphous blob of silicon orbiting cloud resources linked by an encrypted communication envelope.

You'll be able to access all that from a variety of different I/O devices: things with big monitors and keyboards, things with little screens and touch panels, refrigerators, cars, thermostats, etc.

[roymurdock]

Thing is, homomorphic encryption is expensive in terms of time and computing power. I can't see it being implemented for the majority of consumer grade data, which will probably continue to be mined by large corporations and governments in exchange for "free" hardware, software, apps, etc. Financial data, medical data, VIP data, crypto-junkie data - I think there's a strong use case there.

The guys developing enigma said they'd be putting out another paper at the end of the summer but I didn't see anything...any insights into what's going on over there?

[api]

I follow it a bit. Right now we know that it's theoretically possible but it's very slow, too slow for uses other than maybe very niche things.

In the next five years I fully expect to see an acceptably fast implementation that will broaden use to the application areas you mention: high security stuff and crypto junkies.

At that point is where things will get interesting. To make homomorphic crypto really fast will take custom silicon. As soon as I see acceptably fast software homomorphic, I expect to see either a startup or one or more projects inside big companies very quickly pop up with the goal of producing either homomorphic silicon to pair with an existing CPU or -- more interestingly -- a CPU that computes homomorphically as its native mode of operation. That could get interesting.

I predict that by 2030 you will be able to spin up a 100% "blind" sealed VM in the cloud for <$20/month that is fast enough to run what can run on an average cloud instance today.

All compute doesn't have to be homomorphic to get the benefits. You only really need it for encryption, decryption, key generation, authentication, and indexing of security critical data. Boilerplate stuff can be done in the clear. By 2030 standard cleartext compute will be so cheap I wonder if cloud providers will even bother charging for it below very large levels.

Edit: can't make this any deeper but to reply to your reply:

I'm not sure. I think that's up in the air. Right now you can do a whole lot with a small cloud instance with <1gb RAM and 20gb local storage. Software bloat seems to be increasing less rapidly than it was 10 years ago, and there are even movements toward more efficient languages today. So I just have to shrug on that one. We'll see.

[roymurdock]

Well the one thing I would push back on is...how useful will the computing power of the average cloud instance today be in 2030?