Technology is always on a
treadmill, evolving and improving. Like no other front, the new but
revolutionary technology in is shifting gears to perfection. And
there is evident. A clear breakthrough is the community’s ability to convene
and address pressing needs in privacy and scalability. While earlier
blockchains such as did not account for privacy and scalability, new
projects are addressing these very issues. One of the most revolutionary
protocols right now is MimbleWimble. The protocol isgaining traction because of
its ability to address privacy, scalability and fungibility.
Currently, when you use ,
that is, to send , the receiver can extractunrelated transactional
information. Because of this splitting transparency concession, privacy coins like
are increasingly becoming more popular thanks to their transaction
obfuscating ability.
MimbleWimble’s History
The whitepaper for MimbleWimble
was first published by Tom Elvis Jedusor, an alias name referenced from Harry
Potter, in June 2016 but the mainnet is now live. What Elvis proposed was
hiding senders and receivers addresses as well as the amount. This not only
ensured privacy but also reduced block size to allow for more direct and
efficient transactions while making the platform more scalable. Because of
their proposal, Mimble Wimble’s white paper is popular with privacy coins
enthusiasts.
How MimbleWimble Works
MimbleWimble (MW) ensures that
with all transactions, there are no addresses from where the amount is coming
from and to whom it is going to. Furthermore, it hides the amount being
transacted. Transactions are trivially aggregated to hide where a newly created
transaction comes from. The transaction is relayed privately among peers before
becoming public.
Without an address it becomes
impossible for any user to track a transaction. With other , to
send or receive transactions, one must have an address. This addresses act as
tags making it possible for the public to tack transactions, with MimbleWimble,
this simply doesn’t exist because the address (tag) isn’t there.
To hide transaction amounts,
MimbleWimble has used EllipticCurve Cryptography (ECC) creating the underlying
structure to eliminate inputs and outputs data. This essentially takes out your
signature from transactions by combining the signature of the sender and the
receiver to create a private address.
However, using confidential transaction,
the amount being transferred remains visible to the participants of the
transaction.
MimbleWimble goes further ensuring
that not even your IP can be traced. If you send or receive amounts with a
phone or laptop regularly, this phone or laptop can be identified and traced
back to you. However, with a new privacy layer in the MimbleWimble protocol,
there’s extra security preventing tracking.
Grin’s Advantage over Other Privacy Coins
By comparing it to one of the
biggest privacy coins, , it’s clear that Grin—which uses MW, is superior.
Whereas creates dummy transactions to hide the real transaction via ring
signatures, Grin employ transactional output, a technique that makes it hard
for UTXO tracking as well as cut-through transaction via Coinjoin to merge old
transactions.
Clearly, what Mimble Wimble brings
to the fore is a technological breakthrough that has great implication for the
entire ecosystem that would even changehow transactions are done. Its implementation
means like Bitcoinwould be used on a day to day basis without
compromise of privacy, scalability and fungibility via a simple hard fork.
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Published at Wed, 17 Apr 2019 07:54:10 +0000
