- Litecoin will pursue privacy and fungibility
- Fungibility is the biggest hurdle towards crypto adoption
- Litecoin could overtake BTC because of Bitcoin’s quasi-anonymity
Litecoin founder, Charlie Lee, has announced plans to add confidential transactions into a future release. Lee said his coin will put more emphasis on the privacy and fungibility of the coin.
LTC to Compete With XMR and ZEC?
The creator of Litecoin and Managing Director of the Singapore-based Litecoin foundation announced via Twitter that his core development team will add Confidential Transactions (CTs) into an upcoming release of the full node implementation in 2019.
Lee has previously mentioned confidential transactions and shown interest in the technology as a safe and comprehensive solution fungibility issue, the problem he believes has been the biggest hurdle that has prevented cryptocurrencies from enjoying universal adoption as sound money.
Lee has mentioned CT previously in presentations and his interest in the technology as a comprehensive and safe solution to the fungibility problem, something he sees as the final hurdle for cryptocurrencies to be ‘sound money’. He stated on Twitter:
Fungibility is the only property of sound money that is missing from Bitcoin & Litecoin. Now that the scaling debate is behind us, the next battleground will be on fungibility and privacy.
I am now focused on making Litecoin more fungible by adding Confidential Transactions. ?
— Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) January 28, 2019
Monero-like Privacy Features
Statistics show that Monero (XMR) and Zcash (ZEC) experienced the best of times in 2017 when cryptocurrency enthusiasts began ditching Bitcoin (BTC) because of quasi-anonymity, that enables transactions conducted by private coin holders to remain anonymous. Lee went to explain they will add Monero-like privacy features besides dealing with fungibility.
Fungibility is defined as “The property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are essentially interchangeable.” One of the pioneer Bitcoin developers Gregory Maxwell describes Confidential Transactions (CTs) as “the amounts being transacted over the network but not where coins are being sent.” He explained:
“All the transaction data must be conspicuously public so it can be verified, which is at odds with the normal expectation of privacy for traditional monetary instruments.”
Bitcoin’s Quasi-anonymity
Pundits have always seen Bitcoin as the dark web’s favorite, believing transactions on the network are completely anonymous but it appears that Bitcoin’s transactions are only quasi-anonymous, since they can be linked to a person’s identity via their wallet address. That’s how authorities tracked down the infamous “Oxymonster” and confiscated his $700,000 worth of Bitcoin.
Should Litecoin integrate confidential transactions, it will become a real threat to Monero and Zcash and most likely disrupt the entire cryptosphere and that might make Litecoin the ultimate crypto as an answer to Bitcoin’s privacy issues.
