A current article entitled “Breaking MimbleWimble’s privateness mannequin” revealed by Ivan Bogatyy has been inflicting a stir because the creator claims of a “new assault” that ‘traces 96% of all (MimbleWimble) sender and recipient addresses in actual time’. The assault prices $60/week of AWS (Amazon Net Providers) one thing that leads Bogatyy to conculde that:

“Mimblewimble’s privateness is basically flawed.” (and) “ought to now not be thought of a viable various to Zcash or Monero relating to privateness.”

The issue is that no MimbleWimble (MW) developer has ever claimed the protocol was non-public or that it was on par with an asset resembling Monero on this regard, as such Bogatyy’s article engages in a false equivalence fallacy. The issues raised had been already recognized to these engaged on the venture. David Burkett, a member of the Grin++ crew who helps lead the Litecoin MW implementation, weighed in through twitter, to handle the scenario:

“Actually superior write-up, however none of that is “information”. I’m truly shocked solely 96% was traceable. There are a variety of how to assist break linkability in Grin, however none are applied and launched but. As I at all times say, don’t use Grin should you require privateness — it’s not there but.”

A counter article from Daniel Lehnberg, a Grin developer, was later revealed to offer additional clarification and dispel the factual inaccuracies and sensationalised claims:

“This isn’t new to anybody on the Grin crew or anybody who has studied the Mimblewimble protocol. Grin acknowledged the power to hyperlink outputs on chain in a Privateness Primer revealed on its public wiki in November 2018, earlier than mainnet was launched. This drawback encompasses Ian Mier’s “Flashlight assault”, which we now have listed as considered one of our Open Analysis Issues.”
“TL;DR: Mimblewimble privateness isn’t “basically flawed”. The described “assault” on Mimblewimble/Grin is a misunderstanding of a recognized limitation. Whereas the article gives some fascinating numbers on community evaluation, the outcomes offered don’t truly represent an assault, nor do they again up the sensationalized claims made.”

Litecoin creator Charlie Lee adopted in a tweet of his personal stating:

“This limitation of MimbleWimble protocol is well-known. MW is mainly Confidential Transactions with scaling advantages and slight unlinkability. To get a lot better privateness, you possibly can nonetheless use CoinJoin earlier than broadcasting and CJ works very well with MW resulting from CT and aggregation.”

The principle attraction of MW and the rationale the Litecoin Core crew need to implement help for it, has primarily been its capacity to offer community fungibility, future scalability and ‘higher’ (not full) privateness.

Fungibility is derived from the inclusion of confidential transactions (CT) whereby the worth despatched over the community is hidden but verifiable. This implies when interacting with different individuals on the community they wont have the ability to look again and know the way a lot Litecoin you personal. Scalability then again comes from the massively pruneable nature of the protocol and the truth that, when paired with extension blocks, the Litecoin community may have a blocksize improve with out the necessity for a contentious exhausting fork.

MW provides solely pseudo-privacy and that is what Bogatyy’s article discusses. By snapshotting transactions earlier than they endure the coin becoming a member of course of it’s nonetheless potential to trace community participant interactions. Customers can privately coinjoin utilizing a trusted social gathering earlier than broadcasting, nevertheless, this introduces a 3rd social gathering who could then later promote that knowledge on, so it’s removed from a really perfect answer.

Coinjoins mixed with confidential transactions nevertheless, does present an ample stage of privateness over the present scenario. The typical person doesn’t have the time, assets or know the best way to setup such a monitoring system. This doesn’t imply privateness is to not be pursued, for one, MW would not truly use addresses, as an alternative worth is transferred by including one-time outputs to a transaction. In flip offering higher privateness because it turns into inconceivable to re-use addresses.

One good take away is that it’s unlikely incumbent exchanges will delist Litecoin resulting from regulatory challenge individuals have raised and hopefully extra individuals will start to know the character of MW. Full fungability remains to be a objective to purpose for going ahead and is somthing Lee awknowledges stating:

“There’s a number of work to be achieved. Privateness and fungability can be an ongoing battle.”