Litecoin Users Urge Charlie Lee to Bankroll New Privacy Development

Updated: 03 January 2020

Disclosure

Don’t invest unless prepared to lose all the money you invest. This is a high-risk investment, you shouldn’t expect to be protected if something goes wrong.

Join Our Telegram channel to stay up to date on breaking news coverage

An update to the inherent privacy enjoyed by Litecoin users is underway, as users make calls for more funding to help bring the development to life. The development, which will see the MimbleMimble protocol added to the Litecoin infrastructure, will allow users to access seamless, privacy-protecting transactions. However, to get this done, the Litecoin Foundation has earmarked about $72,000 in costs, which it will pay to Grin++ developer David Burkett for 15 hours of work per week for the next year.

The Need for Improved Privacy and Network Security

The idea was first brought up by the Litecoin Foundation in October 2019, when it shared links to two proposals on GitHub. At the time, the Foundation explained that the two proposals would help ensure that the privacy risks associated with using transparent ledgers (which allow for transaction histories to be publicly traceable) are properly mitigated.

The authors of the proposal, including Burkett and Litecoin founder Charlie Lee, explained that the transparency ledgers restrict the functional fungibility of Litecoin, especially in a government-regulated merchant world.

“Personal identifiable information collected from IP addresses, exchanges, or merchants can be leaked then tied to your addresses. Also services, such as chain analysis, provide risk-scores based on whether or not any addresses that they have blacklisted appear in its transactional history. This results in some businesses treating these coins as ‘tainted’ and then sending them back to the owner, or worse yet, shutting down their account,” they added.

The Mimblewimble is a variant of Confidential Transactions, a cryptographic protocol that allows transactions to be obscured but verifiable, thus ensuring privacy and reducing the chances of a double spend.

Lee Needs to Pay Up

Burkett has started work on the project already, and has even contributed two new Litecoin Improvement Proposals- LIP-0002, and LIP-0003. The first one proposes that they add extension blocks, which will be used to augment Litecoin functionality without making any alterations to the network’s consensus rules. LIP-0003, on the other hand, describes how MimbleWimble will be implemented.

Both of the LIPs will need to be implemented before Litecoin, or its users will be able to see any significant benefits from making confidential transactions with MimbleWimble.

Currently, Charlie Lee has pledged to match all donations 1:1, effectively cutting the total amount required for Litecoin users and community members to donate in half. Donations are currently rolling in, but several Litecoin users believe Lee should just pick up the entire tab and pay the developer to make the privacy improvement. As they see things, Lee claimed that he had sold all of his Litecoin around the time when the large-cap altcoin was trading close to its all-time high.

Just f*cking donate the rest yourself Mr. "I Sold at the ATH" https://t.co/my75UOojNg

— Chico Crypto-"The Most Trustless Name in News" (@ChicoCrypto) December 31, 2019