In what could become the latest strange-but-true chapter in bitcoin’s history, an anonymous cryptographer named after Harry Potter’s arch nemesis has put forth a proposal experts believe could help solve major issues facing the network. Authored by ‘Tom Elvis Jedusor’ (Voldemort’s name in the French versions of the book), the Harry Potter references in the paper don’t stop there. The proposal itself, posted to chat channels earlier this August, is named ‘Mimblewimble’ after a tongue-tying curse meant to render an opponent silent. Yet despite the allusions to the popular fantasy series, the paper has real-world implications, outlining how cryptographic privacy and signature techniques could be combined to enable new benefits. Experts soon saw past the imagery and began to take the ideas seriously, with Blockstream Mathematician Andrew Poelstra, for example, being one of the first to remark in IRC discussions that it didn’t seem like a “total crank.” More serious conversation would follow, as bitcoin developers have been more broadly searching for a long-term scalability and anonymity solutions. Many of these same developers now feel that the anonymously posted idea could advance discussions of how these challenges can be solved. Bitcoin Core contributor Bryan Bishop told CoinDesk: “[We’re] talking very seriously about Voldemort as a serious cryptographer that submitted an obviously insightful development.” Scalability potential Today, scalability is seen as an area where bitcoin, and all blockchains, need improvement. Bitcoin developers have thus far rallied around the Lightning Network, an off-chain payments channel, as a way to “scale” the platform from roughly 7-transactions per second to Visa-level payments. But Mimblewimble could offer an alternative way to slim down the blockchain. With bitcoin, users need to download the full transaction history (not a small amount of data) to verify that everything checks out. “In Mimblewimble, you can actually cut out […]
