Can Litecoin Impress Users With The New Upgrade?

[TL; DR]

The new feature expected to improve Litecoins privacy, anonymity, and fungibility feature is Mimblewimble.

Mimblewimble is a term derived from the tying spell in a book series, “The Harry Potter.”

Tom Elvis Jedusor first proposed Mimblewimble in 2016.

In October 2019, Litecoin attempted to integrate the Mimblewimble upgrade to its blockchain protocol.

In October 2020, Litecoin successfully integrated the Mimblewimble testnet.

The Mimblewimble protocol was developed to provide a decentralized framework for blockchains in pursuit of privacy, anonymity, scalability, and fungibility.

Integrating this feature on Litecoin switches it from a less-anonymous protocol to a highly private and anonymous protocol.

The Mimblewimble upgrade helps conceal the sender, receiver, and transaction details on Litecoin.

Mimblewimble uses the Elliptic Curve Cryptography.

This new Litecoin upgrade uses cryptographic protocols that include Confidential Transactions (CT), Coinjoin, Dandelion, and Cut-Through.

Anonymity, fungibility, and scalability are the basic features of Mimblewimble.

Keywords: Mimblewimble, upgrade, blockchain, protocol, blockchain, anonymity, fungibility, privacy, Litecoin.

[Full Article]

There are several protocols and decentralized platforms that leverage blockchain technology. Of all these protocols, none of them has a complete feature or is regarded to be the perfect blockchain platform.

What one is lacking in scalability, another lacks in fungibility. What another has in fungibility, another lacks in privacy. These are some of the issues that characterize blockchain projects.

To ensure the protocols compete favorably with other blockchain protocols and ensure the investors pick them as their investment choice, the developers of these protocols also come up with one feature or another. These features are generally deployed to improve scalability, security, privacy, the operation mechanism, etc.

On this note, Litecoin introduced a new upgrade feature; “The Mimblewimble.”

In this article, we shall highlight Litecoin’s new upgrade feature, the technology behind the feature, and how its users accepted the feature.

Origin of MimbleWimble

---

Image: Cointelegraph

Mimblewimble is a term coined from the tongue-tying spell in Harry Potter, a popular book and movie series. According to the Harry Potter book series, the tongue-tying spell ties the victim’s tongue and prevents them from revealing specific information.

The first Mimblewimble proposal was in 2016, and it was proposed by a developer called Tom Elvis Jedusor. It is a French pen name that means “Voldermort from the books.”

In October 2019, Litecoin embarked on a pair of improvement proposals. The improvement proposal featured MimbleWimble integration and marked the first attempt to introduce the privacy feature to Litecoin.

Albeit, due to low community participation, the integration of the Mimblewimble upgrade could not be implemented. About a year after, in October 2020, Litecoin launched its first Mimblewimble testnet.

The Mimblewimble Upgrade Feature

Image: U. Today

Litecoin, since its launch, has been highly-transparent by default. In every Litecoin transaction, no matter how huge the transaction amount is, the sender and recipient address, including the amount being sent or received, will be revealed in every transaction.

When the Litecoin protocol was launched, this privacy concern did not count; however, when the protocol started expanding with more customers and daily transactions, the privacy feature became of great concern.

Most blockchain technology users were more concerned about the anonymity of blockchain and crypto transactions. In the case of Litecoin, transactions were not anonymous. It was therefore suitable for the developers to swing into action and work on the privacy concerns.

The result of the privacy concern is the Mimblewimble Upgrade feature.

The MimbleWimble upgrade Feature is a privacy-oriented and decentralized protocol that uses a novel mechanism for structuring and storing transactions on the blockchain.

Mimblewimble was developed to provide a framework for blockchains pursuing privacy, crypto anonymity, scalability, and fungibility. The Mimblewimble feature was developed to allow cryptocurrency transactions and information (therein) to remain completely anonymous.

The development of Mimblewimble is to ensure that all transactions’ complete anonymity feature stands and that all the three secrets in crypto transactions are not revealed. They are the sender’s address, the amount involved in the transaction, and the receiver’s address.

Mimblewimble uses the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). The Elliptic Curve Cryptography Approach allows Mimblewimble to fulfill the major requirements of verifying the accurate transaction amount and the people involved without publicly revealing the transaction details.

Implementing the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) as the main mimblewimble mechanism helps strengthen security because ECC is based on discrete logarithms. Discrete logarithms make equations on the blockchain more complicated to work out.

Mimblewimble also combines cryptographic protocols that include Confidential Transactions (CT), Coinjoin, Dandelion, and Cut-Through to achieve maximum security and anonymity. The combination of these protocols helps conceal transaction information and makes it nearly impossible to trace the trail of any transactions.

By implementing the Mimblewimble upgrade feature, the security, anonymity, scalability, and fungibility feature of Litecoin becomes more robust.

Before proffering answers to the question “, can Litecoin impress users with a new upgrade” it is expedient to identify the core features of this new update and see whether these features can impress the users.

Core Features Of Mimblewimble

The development of the Mimblewimble protocol embraces three distinct characteristics. They are;

Anonymity

The first exciting feature of Mimblewimble is that it is anonymous. The details of the sender, receiver, and amount sent or received can not be traced in Mimblewimble-enabled blockchain networks. The protocol design makes it extremely tough to bypass the anonymity of all users.

Fungibility

The difficulty that comes with tracing assets makes Mimblewimble more fungible than other blockchain features that are pseudonymous. Users can exchange any crypto token on the platform using this upgrade feature without fear of less. The fungibility feature prevents the token from being “tainted” by illegal activities bearing less value.

Scalability

In blockchain technology, large block sizes cause scalability issues, which is the network's limited capability to process large amounts of transaction data in a short period.

MimbleWimble has a compact blockchain size and uses this to achieve superior scalability. Therefore, all transactions are processed as fast as possible.

Conclusion

Image: Altcoin Buzz

The Mimblewimble feature is an exceptional protocol that must be deployed by all blockchain platforms that lacks privacy, fungibility, or other scalability concerns.

Among the prominent blockchain protocols that have integrated the Mimblewimble upgrade feature is Litecoin. With the exceptional features of this upgrade, it is expected to impress Litecoin users and attract other investors to Litecoin.

Author: Valentine. A, Gate.io Researcher

This article represents only the researcher's views and does not constitute investment suggestions.

Gate.io reserves all rights to this article. Reposting of the article will be permitted, provided Gate.io is referenced. In all cases, legal action will be taken due to copyright infringement.