What is Mimblewimble?

Mimblewimble is a privacy-oriented decentralized protocol that uses a novel way to build and store transactions on the blockchain. It was designed and launched by an anonymous developer named Tom Elvis Jedusor, who was the French version of “Voldemort” in mid-2016.

How does Mimblewimble work?

The name of the Mimblewimble protocol is taken from the famous tongue spell in the Harry Potter series of books. The spell binds the victim’s tongue to prevent it from leaking specific information. The Mimblewimble protocol is actually like a spell. It provides a framework for the blockchain, providing a new area of ??potential in terms of scalability, fungibility, privacy, and cryptographic anonymity, because the protocol allows cryptocurrency information to remain completely anonymous.

The completely anonymous nature of Mimblewimble transactions contrasts sharply with Bitcoin’s pseudonym (Bitcoin) And other cryptocurrencies that usually reveal three secrets: the sender’s address, the amount of cryptocurrency sent, and the recipient’s address. Mimblewimble will not disclose any of these three secrets or information.

Mimblewimble’s encryption method

Mimblewimble’s encryption method is called elliptic curve encryption (ECC). ECC allows Mimblewimble to meet the two requirements of verifying the correct transaction amount and participants without disclosing any information publicly.

ECC is based on discrete logarithms, which makes the calculation of equations on the blockchain more complicated. Basically, logarithm is the opposite of multiplication, which is easier to perform than factorization. The term discrete is a branch of exponential science, which revolves around a set of discrete mathematical values, covering topics such as probability and set theory. Therefore, implementing ECC Mimblewimble can enhance safety.

In addition, Mimblewimble combines cryptographic protocols such as Confidential Transaction (CT), CoinJoin, Dandelion, and Cut-Through to achieve a higher level of security and anonymity. Generally speaking, these agreements help hide transaction information.

Therefore, the confidential transaction protocol used in other privacy coins such as Monero hides the transaction value on Mimblewimble. The CoinJoin protocol is almost impossible to track the trace of the transaction. Thanks to it, the public address of a transaction can be hidden by combining payments from different senders into a single transaction.

By implementing the Dandelion Protocol, the identities of the sender and receiver can be hidden and kept private. The Cut-Through protocol creates small transaction blocks by aggregating multiple transactions into a set to achieve scalability. Due to the pass-through, the information in the blockchain can be easily deleted without risking security.

What are the main functions of Mimblewimble?

When talking about the Mimblewimble protocol, people always say that it contains three different characteristics that make it unique compared to other blockchains.

First, it is anonymous. Unlike most other blockchain systems that are mostly anonymous, they cannot track the transaction history on Mimblewimble because they have a traceable public address that can determine the sender and receiver of any given transaction. Due to the protocol design, it becomes very difficult to bypass the user’s anonymity.

The second feature is substitutability. Compared with other blockchains, Mimblewimble’s difficult-to-track assets make it more fungible because users can exchange any cryptocurrency on the platform without risk of loss or illegal activities with lower value. Pollution” possibility.

The third feature is scalability. According to the basic knowledge of blockchain, each node adds information about the transaction to the ledger to increase the block size. The large block size will cause scalability issues, that is, the blockchain network has a limited ability to process large amounts of transaction data in a short period of time. By implementing CoinJoin and Cut-Through to eliminate unnecessary transaction information and reduce block size, Mimblewimble achieves excellent scalability with a compact block chain size.

Who is using Mimblewimble?

Several encryption projects choose to deploy Mimblewimble because of its strong security, privacy and scalability.

Therefore, Mimblewimble’s native cryptocurrency MimbleWimble Coin (MWC) or the “technically superior ghost currency” described by the developers of Mimblewimble use this protocol.

In 2016, the first team to theorize the use of Mimblewimble was the team behind the privacy protection digital currency named Grin (GRIN). The developers of Grin’s lightweight open source project have laid the foundation for the project to be created on Mimblewimble, but it was not until January 2019 that it was launched based on Mimblewimble.

Another scalable, fungible and confidential cryptocurrency based on Mimblewimble is Beam (BEAM), which runs on the same core principles as Grin, including complete control of user privacy. It is worth noting that. However, Beam has a confidential decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem that contains decentralized applications (DApps) suitable for various use cases.

Some mainstream cryptocurrencies are also expected to deploy Mimblewimble to provide more privacy and fungibility for their blockchains. Therefore, the team behind Litecoin (LTC), a decentralized cryptocurrency network that uses a protocol similar to Bitcoin. If miners and node operators support it, it plans to activate Mimblewimble on the LTC mainnet at the end of 2021.

Finally, popular privacy coins such as Monero (XMR) And Zcash (Jersey) May benefit Mimblewimble. However, so far, no one has decided to merge with the agreement because it may be an overly complicated and difficult task.

Where can I buy and sell Mimblewimble coins?

Currently, MimbleWimble Coin is traded on many exchanges, including Bitforex, Hotbit, TradeOgre, Whitebit and some other exchanges. The key is Bitforex and Hotbit, which account for the highest percentage of overall cryptocurrency trading volume. More detailed information about MWC transactions can be found on the price tracking websites of cryptocurrencies such as CoinMarketCap or CoinGecko.

How do you mine Mimblewimble coins?

Mimblewimble is based on Proof of work (PoW) concept is widely adopted Introduction to Bitcoin blockchain in 2008. PoW describes a decentralized consensus mechanism that requires network members to make considerable but feasible efforts to spend their energy on solving arbitrary mathematical problems in order to prevent indiscreet or malicious use of computing power. Thanks to PoW, encrypted transactions can be safely processed peer-to-peer (P2P) without the need for a trusted third party.

Mimblewimble is considered a different implementation of the PoW blockchain, which allows for increased privacy and better network scalability. PoW decentralized consensus is associated with cryptocurrency mining or crypto mining. This is a mechanism for verifying transactions in the blockchain. It is a process of creating (or mining) new tokens by solving complex mathematical tasks. In the case of the Mimblewimble blockchain, it is the process of mining its native cryptocurrency Mimblewimble coin (MWC).

Crypto miners guarantee the validity of data and update the blockchain database with cryptocurrency transactions every time it is verified and completed. The mining method itself involves participating in blocks containing information about transactions, and requires the use of cryptographic hash functions to solve complex mathematical puzzles. The first miner to solve the problem was compensated for trading and received a small amount of cryptocurrency.

Most importantly, cryptocurrency miners need a machine with special advanced hardware to counter other miners. Generally, a central processing unit (CPU), a graphics processing unit (GPU), and an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) with different algorithms can be used to mine cryptocurrency. Mimblewimble coin mining can be used in two algorithms: Cuckarood29 and cuckAToo31. The block time is 60 seconds, and the block reward is 0.6 MWC.

There are several mining pools available. The largest and most popular one has about 10,000 active users. It is available in multiple languages ??and has a user-friendly design. Generally speaking, if you are interested in mining MWC in a mining pool, you need to complete a few steps.

First, you need to download the mining software, which is the required version of GPU Miner. Secondly, after your mining equipment is ready, you need to obtain the official MimbleWimble Coin desktop wallet. It is suitable for MacOS, Linux and Windows. It is worth noting that in order to receive payments from the pool, your local MWC wallet must always be online. If you don’t want to do this, it is best to use an address on an exchange where MWC is already listed.

Finally, you can edit the BAT file. If needed, you can specify the name of the miner because you want it to be displayed on the miner’s statistics page, or leave this line blank.

Mimblewimble vs Monero

Historically, Monero is a privacy-focused decentralized cryptocurrency, with the highest market value of all privacy coins. Monero was launched in 2014 as a branch of Bytecoin, just like “money” in Esperanto, which is an auxiliary language used internationally. The goal of the project is to allow transactions on the blockchain to be conducted in a private and anonymous manner.

Monero is based on PoW. Most importantly, the project implemented the CryptoNight protocol, which uses ring signatures to hide the transaction ledger. This also means that it is impossible to know the total number of XMR held by a particular user.

By using environmentally friendly secret transactions, which are a combination of secret transactions, ring signatures and invisible addresses, Monero realizes information confidentiality. Therefore, confidential transactions help conceal the transferred amount. The ring signature adds at least six “bait” coins to each transaction, which look the same as the actual coins spent in the transaction.

Therefore, the sender and receiver cannot be traced, because the detailed information about them and the encrypted amount of transmission are obscured. However, the use of ring signatures has some obvious disadvantages. For example, due to ring signatures, additional data is appended to each transaction, which significantly increases the block size. The Monero blockchain is large and will continue to grow with wider adoption, thereby compromising usability.

Compared to Monero, Mimblewimble is a very elegant protocol that allows for anonymity and scalability. Privacy in Mimblewimble is enabled by default because the use of confidential transactions hides the transferred amount, sender, and receiver. In addition, the Mimblewimble Cut-Through mechanism makes the blockchain smaller.

Therefore, compared with Monero, Mimblewimble achieves excellent confidentiality and scalability. There are some obvious shortcomings of the Mimblewimble protocol. Obviously, the Mimblewimble protocol does have promising new features, designed to overcome the security, privacy, and scalability issues of blockchain technology.

Although, from a design point of view, Mimblewimble has several disadvantages. First, due to the implementation of confidential transactions, it has a lower transaction speed due to the size of the data. Second, the Mimblewimble protocol may be vulnerable to quantum computer attacks. Although quantum computing has great prospects in many fields, it poses a potentially major threat to network security and undermines current encryption methods.

Quantum computers will be able to solve complex puzzles and find the algorithms behind encryption keys that protect user data and the entire blockchain infrastructure. Mimblewimble relies on digital signatures, so if such an attack occurs, blockchain transactions can simply be deanonymized.