Litecoin To Implement Mimblewimble

Litecoin Foundation has approached Beam for plausible agreement to perform Mimblewimble via Extension Blocks on Litecoin. According to the official Blog of Beam, teams behind Litecoin (LTC) and new privacy coin Beam have commenced research towards combining privacy and fungibility to Litecoin by providing an on-chain change of general LTC into a Mimblewimble alternative of LTC and vice versa. Upon such conversion, it will be reasonable to conclude with Mimblewimble LTC in total confidentiality.

Litecoin founder Charlie Lee has lately said that he is examining methods of developing Litecoin’s fungibility by adding Confidential Transactions. In the month of January 2019, Lee had said that fungibility is the only part of undecayed money that is missing from Bitcoin & Litecoin. Now that the scaling discussion is behind us, the ensuing battleground will be on fungibility and secrecy.

He further said that Litecoin developer team spent hours examining how to attach Confidential Transactions. The method to do a softfork CT is very related to preparing extension blocks and extension block may be easier and can do a lot more. On February 6, he tweeted:

Team has been chatting with the @vcorem and @beamprivacy team about MimbleWimble on Litecoin with Extension Blks. Pleasantly surprised that Beam has already implemented switch-commitments w/ ElGamal. It's a safety switch to protect against quantum computing breaking CT soundness.

What Exactly is Mimblewimble?

Similar to the bitcoin which was created by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, the MimbleWimble protocol was revealed by an unidentified alias who published it in a Bitcoin developer chatroom. A user called “Tom Elvis Jedusor” gave the link to a white paper he outlined in July 2016 titled “MimbleWimble”. Shortly after its release, however, Jedusor left the channel and never surfaced again, which makes the development of MimbleWimble as baffling as the development of Bitcoin.

Purchase proof in MimbleWimble relies on hiding components which are typically the private keys of the users and additional costs that are part of the transaction structure. This concealing agent can be leveraged to discover the property of the price in a transaction without revealing its values.

MimbleWimble illustrates a blockchain protocol, which is very focused on high anonymity and high scalability. In MimbleWimble, all values of a transaction are cryptographically hidden and transactions can no longer be uniquely designated. In a sense, they even solely leave from the blockchain. Nevertheless, it can still be guarded via mathematical functions that, for example, no “counterfeit” coins produced and the account balance of the sender is actually greater than the amount to be transferred. However, the greatest technological shift of MimbleWimble over established blockchains such as the Bitcoin blockchain, are the so-called “transaction cut-throughs”, for example, “transaction averages” and the cross-block merging of transactions.

The Bitcoin network shows three ‘secrets’ in each transaction: sender’s location, the amount transferred and receiver’s location. Mimblewimble points at hiding transaction amounts by increasing the amount of the transaction with a secret ‘big’ number only identified by the sender and receiver. Mimblewimble is perfect for Confidential Transactions that obscure the values being negotiated over the network but not where the coins are being transferred.

In other words, transactions from two blocks can be combined into a single block without disbursing their legitimacy as long as the variation between outputs and inputs equals 0. In MimbleWimble, the blocks completely include data about how many coins were circulated on leading inputs (came through proof-of-work / mining in the chain) and how many coins are circulated on leading outputs in the chain, as well as the signatures to ensure validity. Private transactions such as “A sends 1 BTC to B” and “B sends 1BTC to C” are no longer included, which minimizes the blockchain drastically in size and also makes absolutely isolated, as by eliminating the private transactions by giving complete anonymity.

Is MimbleWimble already being used?

At the moment there are two projects that try to make the MimbleWimble protocol operational and to implement it in its own cryptocurrency.

GRIN: Based on the Gringotts wizarding bank, this project was inaugurated by an anonymous “Ignotus Peverell” (the first owner of the Invisibility Cloak and again a Harry Potter analogy) and since then by some equally unknown developers (all of whom have nicknames with Harry Potter Preferred) further developed. So there is no profit-oriented organization behind it and there was no ICO, which is why the project is financed solely by donations. The Grin-Coin utilizes an innovative ASIC-resistant mining algorithm called “Cuckoo Cycle” and every second creates a new coin without a fixed upper limit exists. The Grin Coin is therefore for the eternity inflationary, but with steadily falling inflation.

BEAM: In contrast to Grin, Beam is developed by a company of the same name, even if it is said that the subsequent “maintenance” of the cryptocurrency is to be handed over to a non-profit organization. The company “Beam” will pay out 20% of the newly mined coins as “founder bonus” in the first 5 years, which is why the coin received criticism from some people. Unlike Grin, Beam will also receive a fixed cap.

Disclaimer: This information should not be interpreted as an endorsement of any cryptocurrency. It is not a recommendation to trade. The crypto market is full of surprises and overhyped assets. Do your research before buying anything. Do not invest more than you can afford to lose.

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