COMPARE AND CONTRAST THE PRIVACY FEATURE & SECURITY OF MWC VERSUS MONERO
MWC.MW
Mimblewimble has very formidable privacy attributes. In short, they are that all amounts are encrypted and only known to the parties involved in a transaction (and only to the extent of the size of the transaction taking place) and there are no addresses to track the flow of the cryptocurrency. Transactions only involve inputs and outputs that appear random except to the parties of a transaction. In this article we will discuss how the privacy works and how it compares to other privacy blockchain protocols. One important factor to weigh is not only how the privacy characteristics behave in the current nacent state of privacy coins that are used today, but also how will they behave at scale, as in with the same volume or greater than Bitcoin has today. While there are many privacy coins, we will focus this article on Zcash and Monero and we will also compare to currently available privacy techniques used in Bitcoin today.
Privacy in Mimblewimble has two main aspects: 1.) There are no addresses, 2.) All amounts are encrypted. To briefly understand how privacy works in Mimblewimble, each block has a set of inputs and a set of outputs. Each transaction includes 1 or more inputs and one or more outputs. At the block level, there is no way to link inputs and outputs to a particular transactions. You can think of each block as a large CoinJoin (described later) where there is no way to correlate where funds are coming from or where they are going. Amounts are also unknown. Basically, at scale, a block would just look like a bunch of gibberish to anyone trying to analyze it. Now, we will compare Mimblewimble to several other crytpocurrencies. There was recent medium post where a researcher showed a method to link transactions in Grin, but as we responded, grin is used very infrequently right now and at scale linking would be more difficult. In addition, even though the headline of the paper was "Breaking Mimblewimble", the researcher did mention ways around these limitations, one of which (Coinshuffle) is on our roadmap. The researcher also conceded that the amounts of transactions are unknown and that's a very important aspect.
MONERO PRIVACY
Monero uses ring signatures, ring confidential transactions, and stealth addresses to obfuscate the origins, amounts, and destinations of all transactions. Monero provides all the benefits of a decentralized cryptocurrency, without any of the typical privacy concessions
Monero is a very good privacy coin. It uses a technology known as Ring-CT (or Ring Confidential Transactions). The ring refers to the ring signatures that are used as part of the transactions. One of the best parts of Monero is that it has an anonymity set that crosses different blocks. That means that if I get coins in block a, and anyone in my ring set spends coins in block b, the network doesn't know if it's me spending them or another user. This provides good privacy even if there are few transactions per block. In Mimblewimble, the anonymity set includes all transactions in a block only. There is no possibility of future decoy transactions in another block. Some would argue this makes Monero more private than Mimblewimble, but given large scale use (like the volume in Bitcoin blocks for instance) the anonymity set of Mimblewimble may be sufficient to offer the same level of anonymity set in Monero or at least close enough. Even at lower volumes it's a massive improvement over the legacy blockchains. The main benefit of Mimblewimble over Monero though is its scalability. It is roughly 10 times more scalable than Monero.
