Mimblewimble—Built to Nimble Bitcoin Problem Away

First was a Revolution

The industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century was the beginning of many technological innovation that continues to be felt today. It started with the rumbling sound of a steam engine rumbling across a track and is now completing the circle on a disruptive new system that is changing how we save, spend and send money.

Bitcoin technology is changing the global economy system. From its humble beginning in 2008 to explosive growth a decade later, Bitcoin’s borderless monetary protocol embraces openness, transparency, and for the first time, immutability of data. Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency digital asset built on a cryptographically secure technology powered by decentralization. Its distributed and publicly accessible ledger system eliminating the need for a trusted third party to confirm any financial exchange of value.

The adoption of cryptocurrency into our daily lives will help secure the transfer of monetary values, eliminate intermediaries costs, cut back on time spent sending values through traditional financial institutions and keep users in complete control of their funds. However good it sound, there is a loose end—Bitcoin takes away our financial privacy. It's like when your mailman, your neighbors and even your boss know what you earn, when you earn and probably who you are earning it from.

The lack of privacy in Bitcoin blockchain remains one of the reasons why the mainstream industry are wryly of adopting the technological due to its transparency. Transparency is great, but when misused—and it can be misused, it becomes a destructive weapon in the hands of malicious actors. However, there is no denying the fact that blockchain is the future of exchanging and transacting financial values. And taking the blockchain to this future has become the focus of many innovative solutions

When magic meet technology

Arguably Bitcoin blockchain talks a lot, so how do we solve the talking problem?. This is the problem Tom Elvis Jedusor propose to solve with his Mimblewimble solution. He wrote about his project as a solution to prevent “the blockchain from talking about all user's information”. It is a remarkable solution and also a tongue-tying curse from a wizard book of magic but no, this is not far fetched, since the writer's name is Voldemort's French name from Harry Potter book series. He certainly had a good reason to wave his magic wand at Bitcoin’s technology.

The project was submitted as a blockchain proposal on a bitcoin research channel in July 2016, aiming to increase privacy, scalability and fungibility on the Bitcoin protocol, while creating sustainable growth over time. By the end of the same year, another wizard jumped out of the book. This time it was Ignotus Peverell the original owner of the invisibility cloak another pseudonym who wants to remain invisible on the blockchain apparently. He began working on Mimblewimble white paper as a Github project called Grin.

Unlike Bitcoin transaction, Mimblewimble is all about keeping all transactions private without compromising the immutable and decentralized nature of the blockchain. In a MimbleWimble transaction, all values are encrypted with no traceable addresses because every transaction will look identical to a third party—which is part of Mimblewimble “blinding factors”.

MimbleWimble solution is based on obfuscatory information. In essence, no transaction value can truly be understood except through mathematics performed with ciphertext. Since the blinding element are actually random secret factors that are added and multiply with the real value generating an encrypted result, the privacy level of both sender and recipient is highly contained.Mimblewimble decrypt and verify the result of transactions performed by calculating all output values minus all input values to equal to zero. Technically, it goes like; if you want to send Jamie the handyman $20 worth of Bitcoin, you can do this by adding blinding factors that you and Jamie both know of. These are secret numbers that are multiplied against the real value and added together making it hard to guess the exact real value. This will be done without creating new value or money in the transaction.

With Mimblewimble it gets better, the solution is scalable and maintains a decent rate that cuts down the amount of data needed to process a transaction. With just the right magic, the biggest revolution is about to happen with us as true witness of the moment