The only benefit of MWEB for Litecoin isn’t just increased fungibility. It’s also a form of scaling! Transactions which take place on the Extension Layer don’t take up space on the Litecoin blockchain. Don’t know what MWEB is?
A simple explanation of MimbleWimble: It’s cutting edge cryptography, there’s almost nothing more innovative than this.
“Mimble Wimble is a ridiculously-named technology that stops blockchains from blabbing personal information. It’s named after a Harry Potter spell that stops people from spilling secrets.”
Litecoin believes that as developer David Burkett reaches the final phases of development of Litecoin’s Mimble Wimble Extension Block (MWEB) upgrade, it’s a good time to remind of what this technology is trying to accomplish and why we need it?
To utilize MWEB, a crypto wallet or exchange would be required to integrate it and help serve as the gateway from which you could move your coins in/out from the main chain over to the MWEB side. Exchanges that support Litecoin can decide whether or not to support Litecoin’s MWEB feature and are not forced to embrace it.
Why MWEB is opt-in? If for some reason, government’s one day decided to suppress privacy-enhancing cryptocurrencies (which would consist of applying pressure on regulated crypto exchanges), exchanges would only have to stop supporting the extension block and not Litecoin’s main chain. This is one of the main reasons why this feature was chosen to be opt-in and not obligatory.
In every decision taken, there are trade-offs. In Litecoin’s case, the trade-off for basic/light privacy (opt-in, MW) was made with the intent of being more exchange friendly — and being exchange friendly, also remain liquidity-friendly. On the other hand, a cryptocurrency that’s completely private in every way, shape and form faces a much higher risk of an exchange delisting. This increases the difficulty for people entering the space to gain access to the cryptocurrency.
Although MWEB provides basic privacy features, MWEB should not be used for illicit activities requiring an extreme amount of privacy due to the potential for transactions being linked together via sniffer nodes.
Some were like: Yes but who needs scaling when nobody uses it? How many additional transactions per 2.5 minutes can be added?
Critics were like: Litecoin under performed the S&P 500 these past 3-4 years.
The community were like: Can Taproot be activated also on Litecoin? Wouldn’t make LTC even more scalable? Would be compatible with MWEB or the two things can’t work together?
Litecoin replied stating, Taproot is awesome. We plan to release the next version of Litecoin Core with Taproot activation code.
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