With help from Grin++ developer David Burkett, Charlie Lee decided to marry the two Bitcoin proposals into a soft fork for Litecoin. In comparison, Confidential Transactions are about 10 times bigger than the average Bitcoin transaction.

It’s a major improvement that can effectively turn gigabytes of transaction data into only a few kilobytes, while protecting the privacy of the parties involved. Later on, the transaction data structure gets pruned to only leave information about the first and the last transaction from that block. In a nutshell, every new MimbleWimble block performs a big CoinJoin where all transactions are equal.

The proposal was formalized and developed by Blockstream researcher Andrew Poelstra, who proceeded to present his findings at Scaling Bitcoin 2016 in Milan. The protocol, which was first introduced by pseudonymous creator Tom Elvis Jedusor on a Bitcoin research IRC channel during the summer of 2016, offers scalable confidential transactions. On the other hand, Mimble Wimble is the new kid on the privacy block. They enable easy transfers from one chain to the other, effectively increase the available the block size without compromising the incentive structure, but come at the expense of adding more complexity and becoming an extra burden for the validators’ hardware. First presented as a soft fork scaling solution by Johnson Lau in August 2013, Extension Blocks are essentially sidechains that get secured by the same miners and validated by the same nodes.

Mimble Wimble and Extension Blocks are two interesting Bitcoin proposals that were heavily discussed by Core developers, but haven’t been used for their intended purpose.

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