When can Mimblewimble be implemented?

[thejaytiesto]

What does need to be done before the Mimblewimble solution for privacy can be implemented? I just read the paper and it sounds great. It should solve the issue of the inputs and outputs (having to take special attention to inputs and outputs was always very time consuming and annoying to me but unfortunately you have to if you want some privacy). Apparently it would always send "mixed" coins so you don't have to pay attention to this also you don't need to spend time in JoinMarket stuff just send the coins and you are done (so a user friendly Coinjoin??), and also combines this with Confidential Transactation for masking amount of BTC moved. Finally people could send coins without any worries of companies and attackers tracking peoples money.
This sounds too good! I hope we can see this soon?

[tsoPANos]

I believe a hard fork would be needed for that. Mimblewimble would better be a discrete blockchain implementation to get 100% of it's scalability potential.

[andytoshi]

Because MimbleWimble doesn't support Bitcoin script, it supports far less functionality than Bitcoin and isn't a viable upgrade path for Bitcoin itself.

Having said this, it certainly makes sense that MW should be a sidechain, given that huge amounts of Bitcoin's use is for simple "move money from party X to party Y" transactions, which MW does support. I've been thinking that I might work on this if I can find some spare time. Aside from finding time and people, here is a short list of things I think need to be solved before this could be done:

• Further review (though I'm increasingly comfortable with the idea). This means somebody needs to do a proper writeup (I might do this in the coming days); I will try to present this at Scaling Bitcoin in Milan to increase its exposure, assuming the real author doesn't appear and that my submission is accepted.
• Payment channel support. I think I have a way, but it involves unprunable blockchain data whenever a CLTV branch is taken, which is annoying. Should be possible to do better.
• Figuring out a bunch of fiddly stuff. Like, because input refs can be completely pruned, they should count for more blockspace than outputs, which can only be pruned when spent, which in turn should count for more blockspace than these excess "kG" values, which can never be pruned.
• Going through the engineering work to spec out the UX for payments; paying requires both sender and receiver to produce data. So should everything happen through a payment protocol? Can we finally get rid of user-visible "addresses"? How should payment channels/Lightning interact with this? Multisig requires interaction among all parties even to receive money, how should this work?
  
• I want to spend more time trying to shrink the unprunable data. This can be done interactively, so maybe there is some engineering/UX work that'd make that easy? It can also be done with pairing-based crypto, maybe we should evaluate that option?

This is really exciting stuff, but the paper that was deaddropped by the anonymous author unfortunately leaves a lot of work to get to an actual implementation.

[2_Thumbs_Up]

Because MimbleWimble doesn't support Bitcoin script, it supports far less functionality than Bitcoin and isn't a viable upgrade path for Bitcoin itself.

Having said this, it certainly makes sense that MW should be a sidechain, given that huge amounts of Bitcoin's use is for simple "move money from party X to party Y" transactions, which MW does support.

From my understanding, mimblewimble does the most basic transactions in a better and more private way than Bitcoin does. IMO, those are the features we want in the main chain. Privacy as an addon will lead to the very use of it being considered suspicious. I'd rather have privacy as the default and more advanced scripts as the addon.

That said, I do understand how extremely difficult this would be to roll out in a backwards compatible way. Maybe it would be possible to build sidechains on a sidechain, thus with time making the first sidechain the most used chain, while still offering full backwards compatibility by supporting the legacy chain.

Something like this diagram:

                             Bitcoin
                                 |
Mimblewimble with Lightning Network (Bitcoin 2.0)
      |                          |                          |
Sidechain 1          Sidechain 2          Sidechain 3

This would let everyone transfer over to the mimblewimble chain in their own pace. People who prefer the old blockchain could keep using that, but overtime, the mimblewimble chain could become the default payment method on the network, while still providing more advanced features and scripts through its various sidechains.

[kushti]

Do we have proofs of security for MW? All I've seen to the moment is just some text with a very informal and unclear proposal. Without proofs it is pretty useless.

[Gleb Gamow]

The latest: http://www.coindesk.com/mimblewimble-silly-sounding-tech-seriously-reform-bitcoin/

[eXpl0sive]

I'm surprised that there is not a single significant thread discussing mimblewimble in detail, or even a healthy debate going on.

Considering how this feature brings many functionalities that Bitcoin desires for a long time, I was hoping for a wider discussions going on the forum. Instead I just found a few one-page thread and a couple of press releases.

[buwaytress]

I'm surprised that there is not a single significant thread discussing mimblewimble in detail, or even a healthy debate going on.

Considering how this feature brings many functionalities that Bitcoin desires for a long time, I was hoping for a wider discussions going on the forum. Instead I just found a few one-page thread and a couple of press releases.

I read the link on coindesk - confess it's also the first time I've heard of MW. Apart from the rather odd essay on why women should be more involved in Bitcoin development (what's stopping them, men?), it's one of the more well-cited articles.

I venture that MW's never been properly discussed because it's a sidechain and from what little I understand about this idea... there hasn't been a solution for incentivising sidechain miners (how do you call them?). Are they going to want to maintain it for pennies (rancourous boos ensue)? Or do they settle for huge block rewards that mutate MW into an altcoin (hisses ensue from "core")?

[cellard]

This is why we need to improve the privacy features of bitcoin immediately:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/68nh7q/knock_knock_police_you_have_bitcoins/

This is going to keep happening more and more. If you are unlucky to hold coins tied to former criminal activity you risk that you get raided, it's crazy. People are becoming scared to deal with bitcoin because of this. Fungibility to needs to improved. All bitcoins should be the same, no way to differentiate them. We need to somehow make blockchain analysis impossible. Counting on mimblewimble, , CT coinjoin or whatever to improve this situation.

[687_2]

I'm surprised that there is not a single significant thread discussing mimblewimble in detail, or even a healthy debate going on.

Considering how this feature brings many functionalities that Bitcoin desires for a long time, I was hoping for a wider discussions going on the forum. Instead I just found a few one-page thread and a couple of press releases.

I'm also disappointed that the "scaling" issue gathers the majority of developer focus.

In any case, I think the XBT freight train has left the station and hard forks will not be possible from this point on. MW will have to be an alt coin (side chain, or whatever it's called), swappable with XBT via LN.

I think the key question is: does MW via XBT hardfork make XBT more valuable than XBT + atomic cross chain swaps + LN + etc.? I doubt it. A large, stable and reliable network is always worth more than a small network with more/better features.

[eXpl0sive]

So....   it looks like finally MimbleWimble will move away from Bitcoin and may launch itself as an independent currency:

http://www.coindesk.com/sorting-hat-time-mimblewimble-weighs-own-blockchain-launch/

[TeamMollyMassive]

Mimblewimble time. It looks like a bright future for innovative tech

[Amitabh S]

Has someone converted the original paper to something more easier to read (with proper latex symbols etc)? Please post a link if there is such a version.

[YarkoL]

I read the link on coindesk - confess it's also the first time I've heard of MW. Apart from the rather odd essay on why women should be more involved in Bitcoin development (what's stopping them, men?), it's one of the more well-cited articles.

Groceries are bought, shopping is done mostly by women world-wide. As long as bitcoin is not suitable for making small payments, why should women bother?

As for technical-minded ladies, we have quite a lot of them actually, but they are not very vocal on this here or on reddits. A slight perusal of the general writing style here and the culture that has grown around crypto will soon elucidate why this is the case.

[andytoshi]

So....   it looks like finally MimbleWimble will move away from Bitcoin and may launch itself as an independent currency:

http://www.coindesk.com/sorting-hat-time-mimblewimble-weighs-own-blockchain-launch/

MimbleWimble is just a technology; the blockchain which is supporting its own currency is called "grin" (similar to CryptoNote vs Bytecoin except without the scam surrounding it). I really wish these wouldn't be conflated in the public eye, but the reporting seems to do it quite a bit.

Regarding moving away from Bitcoin, I proposed a scheme to the grin developers by which they can softfork in a Bitcoin peg onto their chain (using Confidential Assets it can cheerfully support its own currency alongside pegged bitcoins alongside whatever, they don't affect each others' security but they do share a privacy set) which they seemed quite enthusiastic about.

I'm surprised that there is not a single significant thread discussing mimblewimble in detail, or even a healthy debate going on.

Considering how this feature brings many functionalities that Bitcoin desires for a long time, I was hoping for a wider discussions going on the forum. Instead I just found a few one-page thread and a couple of press releases.

There has been a lot of research and development happening in the Mimblewimble space lately, but it's extremely fast moving and there hasn't been a lot of writing about it. You can follow the mimblewimble-dev mailing list for some of it, but unfortunately the non-boring stuff been largely happening in meatspace. A short list of developments since this thread was started

• ability to support multiple asset types
• my proposal to have a testcoin alongside the native currency and to support softforking in a bitcoin peg once the bitcoin side is figured out, as well as pegs from other currencies (including blinded-amount pegs from CA-supporting chains)
• the realization that amiller's idea for blinded exponents could be used to efficiently add many "denominations" to each asset, allowing shrinking their rangeproofs with much less of a privacy hit than we'd originally expected
• the realization that we could attach some forms of scripting to mimblewimble after all
• the realization that for many things we could get script functionality with much better privacy and without any changes to the Voldemort design at all and this would be uncensorable because it would result in normal looking transactions
• oh, and we can Lightning this way
• oh, and this doesn't have much to do with MW at all, any blockchain that supports schnorr signatures will allow these uncensorable efficiently verifiable hyper-private contracts which include atomic swaps between the chains
• more to come on this front, still iterating and working out details...
• realization that Ruffing and Moreno-Sanchez's ValueShuffle is compatible with Mimblewimble+Confidential Assets allowing coinjoin where the original transactions never hit the network so nobody can record them and PS it compresses Mimblewimble's already-cool "one signature per transaction" to "one signature per aggregate transaction" which is way better and will incentivize people to use the tech, improving their privacy

and I'm sure there's other stuff I'm forgetting.

[eXpl0sive]

@andytoshi: thanks for the detailed information, mate! Really appreciate that. Looks like there's a lot of stuff going on, just not being discussed on this forum.

I am really looking forward to this project's success.

[ludbega]

I always heard for Mimblewimble 2 weeks ago about the fail with bitcoin.

I search some good first news or threats about this. I think this is just VERY big.

http://www.coindesk.com/are-sidechains-a-better-solution-for-bitcoins-scaling-debate/