Monero Monitor: Mimblewimble with Andrew Poelstra

SPECIAL EPISODE

December 11, 2017 — 71 mins

Welcome to a special CROSS EPISODE where this week Monero Monitor does a guest episode on our network. In July 2016, an unknown developer going by the name “Tom Elvis Jedusor” dropped a link to a Tor hidden service on the bitcoin-wizards IRC channel. In it, he revealed a new protocol dubbed “Mimblewimble” after the tongue-tying curse in Harry Potter, because “it is used to prevent the blockchain from talking about all user’s information”.

In the time since, multiple researchers and developers have continued to flesh out and build on Jedusor’s innovation, in many respects led by Andrew Poelstra, a Bitcoin developer and mathematician at Blockstream.

This deep dive with Andrew covers the technical details of Mimblewimble’s scaling and privacy-enhancing features, discusses the real world logistics of using the protocol, and looks at some of the coolest features enabled by the technology. We discuss how Bulletproofs can help both Mimblewimble and Monero better scale, and also touch on how ValueShuffle might further improve privacy in Mimblewimble.