Coder Going By The Name Voldemort Is Working To Solve Bitcoin's Biggest Problem

Rage Review : Recently, a coder named Voldemort published a solution to the problem of Bitcoin scalability and privacy. Perhaps this person is a die-hard fan of Harry Potter, and there are many references to the book in the book. However, technical experts did not ignore him, and still praised the proposal called Mimblewimble as an alternative to reduce the size of the blockchain. Previously, confidential transactions and signature collections could only handle one problem and could not take both into account. This proposal is a major breakthrough. However, the poor compatibility of the solution is the biggest factor hindering its implementation. Perhaps there will be a way to solve the compatibility problem in the future.

Translation: Annie_Xu

In a weird but true chapter in the history of bitcoin, an anonymous coder going by the pseudonym of Harry Potter's nemesis Voldemort has come up with a proposal that experts say could help solve the network's biggest problems.

The author of the suggestion is "Tom Elvis Jedusor", which is the name of Voldemort in the French version of Harry Potter. However, the article uses words from Harry Potter more than once. Earlier this month, this person published the suggestion and named it "Mimblewimble", which is a spell in Harry Potter that makes the enemy unable to speak.

Yet despite the allusion to the myth, the document has real-world implications, suggesting ways to combine cryptographic privacy and signature technology to gain new benefits. Experts were quick to see the practical implications of this fantasy scenario, with Blockstream mathematician Andrew Poelstra, who first chatted on IRC, noting that it didn’t seem like “complete fantasy.”

And because bitcoin developers are looking for solutions to anonymity and scalability, people will discuss the document more seriously. Many of these developers believe that this anonymously published suggestion can advance the discussion process of solutions.

Bitcoin Core code contributor Bryan Bishop commented on this:

"We take this Voldemort seriously as a serious coder who provides a clear development solution."

Potential for scalability

Currently, scalability is considered an element that must be perfected by Bitcoin and even all blockchains.

Bitcoin developers have also rallied around the Lightning Network, an off-chain payment channel designed to boost the platform’s transaction capacity from seven transactions per second to Visa-like speeds. But Mimblewimble has emerged as an alternative to shrinking the size of the blockchain.

Bitcoin users must download all transaction histories before they can verify them, and it is important to know that this amount of data is not small.

Andrew Poelstra

Poelstra said:

"In Mimblewimble, you can completely omit all the intermediate transactions. Imagine that each block only stores one transaction. When you synchronize all the historical data in the blockchain, it does not disappear into thin air, but is compressed."

“That’s the innovation of Mimblewimble, it looks at the current occupancy of the system, not the uptime of the system.”

Poelstra also pointed out that the proposal is about more than just capacity expansion.

No more trade-offs between privacy and scalability?

In addition to scalability, there is also the issue of privacy.

Because the blockchain is an open ledger that anyone can read and write to, Bitcoin is not completely anonymous as advertised, which has deterred privacy advocates and businesses that want to use Bitcoin because they don't want their financial data to be visible to adversaries or others.

All privacy solutions to date have required a compromise between scalability and privacy. The Confidential Transactions implemented by blockchain developers on sidechains also have technical flaws and have strict requirements on transaction size.

Therefore, the proposal document proposes:

“These solutions are great and improve Bitcoin’s security, but they make the data size problem worse. Confidential Transactions require several kilobytes of output proof files, and van Saberhagen signatures require that every output be stored forever because there is no way to know when a bitcoin was spent.”

Mimblewimble provides a way around this problem by combining several earlier Bitcoin cryptographic techniques: signature aggregation and Confidential Transactions.

Using signature aggregation, it may be possible to compress all signatures into one block, thereby reducing the size of the blockchain while ensuring the security of transactions.

Bitcoin Core developer Greg Maxwell proposed Confidential Transactions, which can shield the transaction amount so that only the sender and receiver can see the transfer amount.

Greg Maxwell

Mimblewimble combines these two technologies.

Bishop explained:

“Basically it combines the best of both worlds. We can bring all the signatures together, and we get the benefits of confidential transactions.”

Future development directions

Developers are so excited about this that Bishop said someone — not necessarily the anonymous developer — might discuss the idea at the Scaling Bitcoin conference in Milan, Italy, next month.

But challenges remain. The biggest problem with Mimblewimble is that it is incompatible with Bitcoin’s existing scripting language.

Bishop explained:

“It cannot be deployed on the Bitcoin network yet because it is incompatible with many popular features.”

Mimblewimble is only suitable for simple systems, that is, simple and direct transaction sending. That is to say, planned upgrades such as smart contracts and micropayment channels are not compatible with Mimblewimble, at least for now.

And Poelstra said that it might be possible to use it for altcoins or sidechains in the future. But maybe other developers will find a way to implement this solution.

Bishop said:

"Developers haven't even started to explore unique ways to deploy this yet, and I think we're likely to see a lot of creativity in the future."