Litecoin MimbleWimble June Update
Good / Bad news everyone! We are officially half way through 2020 and with June now behind us, David Burkett, the project leader for the Litecoin MimbleWimble implementation has published another development update so let’s jump right into it.
Starting with mempool logic. Upon further exploration Burkett states this area has proven to be ‘quite a bit more complex’ than anticipated, as such it will need to be revisited after the test-net launches this September.
“For now though, a very minimal implementation supporting MW transactions has been written.”
Additionally, code has been written to support the mining of extension blocks which will store MimbleWimble transactions. Burkett reports ‘there are a few edge cases left to handle, and much more testing is needed’. There have been a few concerns raised in this update however as Burkett writes:
“I’ve had concerns about the way we were storing mimblewimble block data in a separate database. It was originally designed this way to be a clean separation from the existing code, in order to facilitate merging future bitcoin commits. Having separate databases is generally a bad idea though, because we lose the ability to make atomic updates, which means the 2 databases could become out of sync. This can lead to a whole host of problems, potentially even ones that are exploitable by remote attackers.”
Due to these concerns, Burkett has ‘decided to spend some time modifying the code for serializing and deserializing MW blocks & transactions to disk’.
“I was able to take advantage of the groundwork that was laid down as part of the segwit enhancement, to cleanly support serializing the additional data without making major changes to the existing block storage format. As a result, upgraded nodes can successfully save extension block data to disk the same place they’ve always saved blocks, without having to introduce an additional database. A side effect of these changes is that it was relatively straightforward to add support for sharing mimblewimble transactions over the p2p network, which is the first step toward July’s goal of handling MW data as part of the Initial Block Download.”
The future development MimbleWimble roadmap has now been updated and remains on track with July focusing on the initial block download, August, Chain reorg logic and September the Activation logic and launch of the test-net.
David Burkett is a publicly funded developer working on the Litecoin Core Project.
