Litecoin development progress: anonymous transaction function is being studied

The Litecoin team is working on anonymous transaction functions. We believe that the anonymous theory is solid and feasible and can be realized. We have already started to consider a detailed development plan.

The anonymous transaction function has been implemented in a project codenamed "Elements Alpha", which is intended to be a sidechain for Bitcoin. We believe that sidechains are very useful features, and anonymous transactions are more suitable for implementation on the Litecoin main chain. We will refer to the code of the project codenamed "Elements Alpha", so that it will be easier to implement anonymous transactions on Litecoin.

According to the Linux Foundation's report on Bitcoin development, we will need a soft fork to implement anonymous transactions on Segwit. We will implement Segwit as soon as possible and then implement anonymous transactions.

The addition of anonymity will increase the size of Litecoin blocks, but we don't need to worry too much about this. Each anonymous transaction will add about 1.8K capacity (slightly larger total transaction size). Although this is several times larger than non-anonymous transactions, we can optimize the additional capacity added by adding anonymity through isolated verification. In this way, the actual number of transactions contained in each block will not decrease much. Of course, after adding anonymity, more disk space is definitely needed to save the entire Litecoin blockchain. However, as disk unit capacity becomes cheaper and cheaper, these are not a problem. Using the anonymous transaction function will also contribute more transaction fees to miners.

While studying the anonymity function and the encryption principle it uses, we found that it lacks quantum resistance. Although it is not a problem now, with the development of technology, we will sooner or later face the emergence of quantum computers. We plan to upgrade the current anonymous transaction function to make it quantum resistant. Charlie named it "QRCT" quantum resistant anonymous transaction. We will use lattice cryptography to replace the commonly used elliptic curve method to resist quantum computers.

We then realized that Litecoin itself lacks the ability to resist quantum computers, because in the process of using Litecoin transactions, we need to put the public key in the transaction, so that the quantum computer can deduce the private key through the public key and modify the transaction address information. Fortunately, we will have a way to solve this problem.

The idea of ​​enhancing Litecoin’s ability to resist quantum computers is obviously still in a very early stage. Moreover, we will achieve quantum computer resistance through soft fork upgrades. We very much hope that the Litecoin community with many users can take the initiative to lead the entire blockchain community to take quantum computer resistance seriously.

We once again invite more like-minded friends to join us and study blockchain together (Litecoin China Blockchain Community QQ Group: 224855357 PZ’s Weibo address: http://www.weibo.com/u/1409782764?is_all=1).

[1] https://elementsproject.org/
[2] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2016-January/012194.html
[3] http://news.mit.edu/2016/quantum-computer-end-encryption-schemes-0303
[4] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-is-not-quantum-safe-and-how-we-can-fix-1375242150