WHAT IS A MIMBLEWIMBLE AMD HOW DOES IT WORK?

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A blockchain architecture called Mimblewimble (MW) uses an innovative method of organising and storing transactions. It is an alternative Proof of Work (PoW) blockchain implementation that enables greater privacy and better network scalability.

Tom Elvis Jedusor, who goes by the alias Mimblewimble, unveiled the concept in the middle of 2016. He was able to communicate the essential concepts, but the initial Mimblewimble text had some gaps. Blockstream researcher Andrew Poelstra used this as motivation to research and develop the original idea.

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The conventional model of blockchain transactions is altered by mimblewimble. As a
result, a blockchain's history can be compressed, making it quicker and easier to download, synchronize, and validate.

Because there are no recognizable or reusable addresses in a MW blockchain, all transactions appear to outsiders as random data. Only the relevant participants can see the transaction data.

A Mimblewimble block thus resembles a single huge transaction rather than a collection of several smaller ones. Blocks can thus be validated and verified, but they do not contain information about individual transactions. There is no mechanism to connect specific inputs to their corresponding outputs.

Consider the case below. Mom gives Alice 5 MW coins, and Dad gives Alice 5 MW coins. She then sends Bob those 10 coins. Although the transactions have been validated, their specifics are private. Bob doesn't know who earlier sent Alice the 10 pennies; all he knows is that she sent them to him.

On a Mimblewimble blockchain, the sender and recipient must trade verifying data in order to move the coins. Therefore, even though Alice and Bob still need to communicate, they don't both need to be online at the same time for the transaction to take place.

Additionally, Mimblewimble uses a technique called cut-through to remove extraneous transaction data from blocks, hence reducing the block data. Therefore, the block would only record one input-output pair (from Alice's parents to Bob), rather than recording each input and output (from Alice to her parents and from Alice to Bob).

Technically speaking, the Confidential Transactions (CT) idea, put up by Adam Back in 2013 and implemented by Greg Maxwell and Pieter Wuille, is supported and expanded upon by the Mimblewimble design. CT is a privacy mechanism that obscures the dollar amounts of blockchain transfers, to put it simply.

_{https://academy.binance.com/en/articles/what-is-mimblewimble}