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As you know the Litecoin implementation of MimbleWimble on extensions blocks is already running on testnet. They will go mainnet in a year. I think this could be a great improvement for Bitcoin. We could use Bitcoin for private transactions when required, no need of coin mixers or Monero anymore. Exchanges like Coinbase will not delist Bitcoin as they already have ZCash which have public and private transactions too.

In the rare case there is a hidden inflation bug, new coins created in the extension block can't infiltrate the canonical chain because the amounts are public, so the bug would be detected sooner or later when someone can't send back his coins to the canonical chain.

The developer has said he's going to write a BIP and make a pull request to Bitcoin. What are the chances it's approved?

Regards

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  • Nothing is stopping someone from implementing MW on a higher layer network, but I think the chance of seeing the Bitcoin protocol altered to include MW is very slim.
    – chytrik
    Oct 14, 2020 at 21:17
  • I understand you but implementing it on extension blocks makes a hidden inflation bug impossible on the main chain. Exchanges, shops and institution would accept only coins from the main chain, public transactions. The private coins would be used in person to person payments, or to erase your history before doing public payments. What would be risky is a hard fork with all transactions private, but extension blocks make it safe.
    – Tux
    Oct 15, 2020 at 9:16

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There is zero chance of it being used in Bitcoin.

There is prior incidents to gain wisdom from. Before zcash existed as an altcoin, zcoin was an implementation of a similar concept which people rallied behind and tried to ham fist into Bitcoin. It's essential, it's a mandatory, it's my right to be private! If you don't put zcoin into Bitcoin you are the manifestation of the devil himself, brought to destroy the fabric of society!

Unfortunately whenever things like this have been social pressured into existence for reasons of perceived valor, it has lead to problems. In the case of zcoin, it was later discovered that the implementation of zcoin slated for use in Bitcoin had an unbounded, invisible inflation bug which would have instantly ended the currency.

Bitcoin survives by being conservative with changes, not grabbing onto everything shiny.

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  • I agree Bitcoin must be conservative, but implementing MW on extension blocks protects the main chain for any possible hidden inflation bug. People should have their savings in the main chain and move small amounts to the extension block to do private transactions with other people. In the worst case, the extension block is purged with a hard fork and people only lose the amount they had there. It's a small risk that most users would be happy to take. And don't forget is scalable privacy, not like Monero :)
    – Tux
    Oct 14, 2020 at 14:45
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I had read this post long back. Not sure if everything still applies:

https://thebitcoin.pub/t/mimblewimble-the-good-and-the-bad/49971

There is a need to have some form of communication between the sender and receiver to arrange for the transaction to be signed by both parties. This makes sending transactions a little bit more complicated compared to Bitcoin. It could also require TX participants to be online for the TX to occur.

The way the MW transactions are crafted makes it more difficult to create multi-party transactions as multiple parties have to communicate to craft the TX.

It is possible and probably easy for anyone to keep recording all the transactions from the unconfirmed transaction pool. This data could be used to build detailed transaction graphs of the network.

The privacy guarantee of MimbleWimble, in this case, is equivalent to using Bitcoin with generating a new address for each new transaction (with the added advantage of hiding the TX amount). Indeed, this can make it more difficult to trace transactions but it is not impossible to do this kind of analysis.

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Also this paragraph from https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/91843/ by sipa:

So again: CoinJoin is not broken; it helps when used right. Mimblewimble or its privacy is also not broken - Confidential Transactions and the ability for non-interactive CoinJoin are great. Mimblewimble also enables non-interactive CoinJoin, which happens to be usable as a scalability improvement as well, but when done publicly, does not improve privacy.

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    MimbleWimble is great as you don't need a third party (the coin mixer) anymore, and is very lightweight and scalable. Implementing it on extension blocks also protects the main chain for any possible hidden inflation bug.
    – Tux
    Oct 14, 2020 at 14:36

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