- Fungibility is the only property of sound money, says Charlie Lee
- MimbleWimble Protocol to aid in Litecoin’s fungibility, privacy, and scalability
- Confidential Transactions will make Litecoin more scalable than Bitcoin
Charlie Lee, the creator of Litecoin announced through a tweet on February 2, 2019, that the digital token’s development team is focusing on how Confidential Transactions can be added to Litecoin in order to make the cryptocurrency fungible and private through the use of bulletproof MimbleWimble with extension blocks.
Fungibility is Missing in Bitcoin and Litecoin
Charlie Lee in a tweet on January 28, 2019, stated that when it comes to Bitcoin and Litecoin, fungibility is missing in either. Nonetheless, this fungible nature is the greatest property of any currency tagged money.
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
The developer also noted for Litecoin to meet this expectation, then more focus has to be given to fungibility and privacy because soon, these will be the major points of concern instead of scalability.
In a more recent tweet, the CEO revealed that Litecoin’s development team are already discussing on how to implement Confidential Transactions in order to make the asset fungible and possibly, a softfork may be employed.
Litecoin dev team spent hours discussing how to add Confidential Transactions. The way to do a softfork CT is very similar to doing extension blocks and extension blk may be simpler and can do a lot more. We are now also exploring doing bulletproof MimbleWimble w/ extension blks. pic.twitter.com/ePBh8PKNu8
— Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) February 3, 2019
Lee also said Confidential Transactions can be likened to carrying out extensions blocks and in this case, the team’s area of focus will be on bulletproof MimbleWimble with extension blocks.
MimbleWimble to Aid in Fungibility, Privacy, and Scalability
MimbleWimble, on the other hand, is a protocol that gets its name from the movie “Harry Potter”, denoting a spell that is used to make victims speech impaired. Tom Elvis Jedusor, the user behind protocol outlined the capabilities of this protocol.
According to Jedusor, the MimbleWimble blockchain focuses on making transactions as private as possible where only the transacting parties will be able to tell the amount that was sent, which is not the case with other cryptocurrency transactions.
An instance of this is the Grin (GRIN) virtual asset which was listed on Kucoin on January 24.
The Singapore-based exchange during GRIN’s launch pointed out that the MimbleWimble blockchain which GRIN is based on brings about its fungibility, privacy, and scalability.
Reportedly, Beam and Monero are also boasting of the same protocol and in the case of the latter, these features will be implemented via a sidechain known as Tari. Therefore, if the same is the case with Litecoin, this will be an added layer of security.
Lee may have, however, planted doubts in the mind of people about the actualization of the proposed feature. Hours after the first publication, he responded to a tweet by saying:
“We haven’t announced anything. Just letting the community know what we are exploring and seeing what people think about MimbleWimble and extension blocks.”
Nevertheless, more light has been thrown into the expected outcome of a Litecoin that makes use of Confidential Transactions, In Lee’s opinion, the virtual asset will be more scalable than Bitcoin and most especially, the ability to mine it, will not be greatly unaffected.