MimbleWimble complete Beginner’s Guide

What is MimbleWimble

While earlier blockchains such as Bitcoin did not account for privacy and scalability, new projects are addressing these very issues. One of the most revolutionary protocols right now is MimbleWimble. The protocol is gaining traction because of its ability to address privacy, scalability and fungibility. Currently coins that use this technology are Grin, Beam, Epic Cash and Litecoin is starting sidechain development.

Why is Privacy important? Currently, when you use Bitcoin, that is, to send bitcoin, the receiver can extract unrelated transactional information. Because of this splitting transparency concession, privacy coins like Monero are increasingly becoming more popular thanks to their transaction obfuscating ability.

MimbleWimble’s History

The whitepaper for MimbleWimble was first published by Tom Elvis Jedusor, an alias name referenced from Harry Potter, in June 2016 but the mainnet is now live. What Elvis proposed was hiding senders and receivers addresses as well as the amount. This not only ensured privacy but also reduced block size to allow for more direct and efficient transactions while making the platform more scalable. Because of their proposal, Mimble Wimble’s white paper is popular with privacy coins enthusiasts.

How does MimbleWimble Works

MimbleWimble (MW) ensures that with all transactions, there are no addresses from where the amount is coming from and to whom it is going to. Furthermore, it hides the amount being transacted. Transactions are trivially aggregated to hide where a newly created transaction comes from. The transaction is relayed privately among peers before becoming public.

Without an address it becomes impossible for any user to track a transaction. With other cryptocurrencies, to send or receive transactions, one must have an address. This addresses act as tags making it possible for the public to tack transactions, with MimbleWimble, this simply doesn’t exist because the address (tag) isn’t there.

To hide transaction amounts, MimbleWimble has used EllipticCurve Cryptography (ECC) creating the underlying structure to eliminate inputs and outputs data. This essentially takes out your signature from transactions by combining the signature of the sender and the receiver to create a private address.

However, using confidential transaction, the amount being transferred remains visible to the participants of the transaction.

MimbleWimble goes further ensuring that not even your IP can be traced. If you send or receive amounts with a phone or laptop regularly, this phone or laptop can be identified and traced back to you. However, with a new privacy layer in the MimbleWimble protocol, there’s extra security preventing tracking.

Grin’s Advantage over Other Privacy Coins

By comparing it to one of the biggest privacy coins, Monero, it’s clear that Grin—which uses MW, is superior. Whereas Monero creates dummy transactions to hide the real transaction via ring signatures, Grin employ transactional output, a technique that makes it hard for UTXO tracking as well as cut-through transaction via Coinjoin to merge old transactions.

Clearly, what Mimble Wimble brings to the fore is a technological breakthrough that has great implication for the entire ecosystem that would even changehow transactions are done. Its implementation means cryptocurrencies like Bitcoinwould be used on a day to day basis without compromise of privacy, scalability and fungibility via a simple hard fork.

How to mine MimbleWimble Coins

MimbleWimble coins can be mined using GPU and CPU hardware. To find out how to mine Epic Cash, check out our full Epic Cash Mining guide.

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Michael Gu
Michael Gu, Creator of Boxmining, stared in the Blockchain space as a Bitcoin miner in 2012. Something he immediately noticed was that accurate information is hard to come by in this space. He started Boxmining in 2017 mainly as a passion project, to educate people on digital assets and share his experiences. Being based in Asia, Michael also found a huge discrepancy between digital asset trends and knowledge gap in the West and China.