Litecoin (LTC), often referred to as the silver to Bitcoin’s (BTC) gold, has recently been pursuing greater privacy features at the protocol level.
At the end of January, Litecoin founder Charlie Lee announced that confidential transactions (CT) will soon be added to Litecoin. Now, just 1 week later, Lee has confirmed talks with Beam, a scalable and confidential cryptocurrency, for the implementation of MimbleWimble on Litecoin.
According to Lee, the Litecoin development team are beginning to explore the implementation of CT by doing bulletproof MimbleWimble with extension blocks. According to devs, instead of implementing CT via a soft fork, the implementation of MimbleWimble will be simpler and offer far more benefits.
Lee announced this newfound development via Twitter:
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.
— Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) February 6, 2019
Litecoin Foundation and Beam Collaboration
The Litecoin Foundation is very serious about the implementation of privacy at the protocol level, as it is of the utmost importance to improve fungibility and to set a precedent for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
In a blog post announcing the Litecoin and Beam collaboration, Beam stated:
“One of Beam’s goals is to advance privacy in the cryptocurrency space and promote the MimbleWimble protoocl… We have started exploration towards adding privacy and fungibility to Litecoin by allowing on-chain conversion of regular LTC into a MimbleWimble variant of LTC and vice versa. Upon such a conversion, it will be possible to transact with MimbleWimble LTC in complete confidentiality.”
What Is Beam and the MimbleWimble Protocol?
Beam is the first cryptocurrency project to be built on the MimbleWimble protocol. The crypto offers a range of newfound privacy solutions never seen before, and is claimed to be more private than any other privacy coin, including Monero and Zcash.
Upon launching Beam on the 10th anniversary of Bitcoin, CEO of Beam Alexander Zaidelson said:
“Sovereignty over one’s own information is a basic human right, and applies to all aspects of life, and especially to financial transactions.”
As for the MimbleWimble protocol, it’s a relatively new protocol that allows users to encrypt all transactional data made on the cryptocurrency network by adding an extra layer of security to all transactions. The protocol also uses CoinJoin, which combines multiple payment data to hide individual transactions in a cryptographic haze.
The MimbleWimble protocol’s technology is still very new and highly experimental, but is potentially very promising.
What do you think about Litecoin’s recent direction regarding privacy? Will Litecoin set a precedent for Bitcoin? Let us know what you think in the comment section below.
