Grin, an anonymous cryptocurrency which made its appearance on Jan. 15, is a new privacy coin that uses the Mimblewimble protocol, named after the famous Harry Potter books. This protocol fundamentally blends together all the transactions from the people, so nobody can really trace them. Is Grin the next big thing?
What is Grin Coin & MimbleWimble?
Grin is a cryptocurrency project centered on secrecy, scalability, and fungibility that is created by executing a MimbleWimble blockchain with some different design. MimbleWimble is one blockchain protocol introduced by Tom Elvis Jedusor in July 2016 and has obtained friction amongst multiple Bitcoin and privacy enthusiasts. To know Grin and how it operates, it is essential to first know MimbleWimble and its benefits.
Grin is an off-center, new privacy coin which gives users with a special level of secrecy and anonymity during their financial trade-offs. Grin has governance which can be associated with the cyberpunk doctrine; it promotes a society made decentralization. The developers are volunteers, and there is no ICO.
Grin is employing the Mimblewimble protocol which links two ideas. The first idea is a secret transaction. A secret transaction encrypts the content of the transaction, so it is not noticeable to anyone outside the members of this particular transaction. The other is the Cut-Thorough. In Cut-Through the transactions are centralized inside a block, so all common transactions are eliminated. This idea significantly decreases the proportion of the blockchain which executes its storage much more scalable.
MimbleWimble
Similar to the bitcoin which was created by the hidden Satoshi Nakamoto, the MimbleWimble protocol was developed by an anonymous alias who declared it in a Bitcoin developer chatroom. A user called “Tom Elvis Jedusor” gave the link to a white paper he drafted in July 2016 titled “MimbleWimble”. Shortly after its announcement, however, Jedusor left the channel and never surfaced again, which causes the development of MimbleWimble as puzzling as the development of Bitcoin.
Purchase evidence in MimbleWimble relies on concealing constituents which are typically the private keys of the users and extra expenses that are part of the transaction essence. This concealing agent can be leveraged to determine possession of the price in a transaction without disclosing its values.
Establishing transactions with Mimblewimble expects that the total of transaction products minus the total of the figures is always equal to zero. This is achieved by utilizing Secret Transactions that establish a double spend or production of new stocks and which did not transpire with a transaction while concurrently confusing the amounts in the transaction. MimbleWimble obtains their idea for this from Confidential Transactions (CTs) by Greg Maxwell.
What is MimbleWimble Good For?
MimbleWimble describes a blockchain protocol, which is very focused on high anonymity and high scalability. In MimbleWimble, all amounts of a transaction are cryptographically obscured and transactions can no longer be uniquely assigned. In a sense, they even simply escape from the blockchain. Nevertheless, it can still be secured via mathematical functions that, for example, no “counterfeit” coins produced and the account balance of the sender is actually greater than the amount to be transferred. However, the greatest technological shift of MimbleWimble over established blockchains such as the Bitcoin blockchain, are the so-called “transaction cut-throughs”, for example, “transaction averages” and the cross-block merging of transactions.
In other words, transactions from two blocks can be blended into a single block without expending their legality as long as the difference between outputs and inputs equals 0. In MimbleWimble, the blocks simply include data about how many coins were issued on outstanding inputs (came through proof-of-work / mining in the chain) and how many coins are issued on outstanding outputs in the chain, as well as the signatures to secure legality. Private transactions such as “A sends 1 BTC to B” and “B sends 1BTC to C” are no longer involved, which decreases the blockchain drastically in size and also makes completely private, as by removing the private transactions by giving absolute anonymity.
At the moment there is one more project which is trying to make the MimbleWimble protocol operational and to implement it in a cryptocurrency of its own. The name of this project is Beam. The Beam is developed by a company of the same name. The company “Beam” will pay out 20% of the newly minted coins in the first 5 years as a “founder bonus”.
Whether the MimbleWimble protocol and its first implementations Grin and Beam can win the battle of the Privacy Coins is still unclear. The protocol itself, however, has tremendous potential and, if some weaknesses are annihilated over time, it can definitely play a decisive role in the crypto-cosmos. Theoretically, the MimbleWimble protocol could also be used directly as a sidechain at Bitcoin, which could be a solution for Bitcoin’s scaling problems.
Disclaimer: This information should not be interpreted as an endorsement of any cryptocurrency. It is not a recommendation to trade. The cryptocurrency market is full of surprises and overhyped assets. Do your research before buying anything. Do not invest more than you can afford to lose.
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