mimblewimble team mailing list archive

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl@xxxxxxxx>]

hi, my name's luke leighton, i've been following crypto-currencies for
some time, i'm a software libre engineer and advocate.  i've read the
mimblewimble whitepaper and i get it.

i have been... tasked, shall we say... with finding a peer-to-peer
distributed crypto-currency with its own built-in distributed atomic
aribtrater-less foreign exchange protocol (bisq.network combined with
crypto-bridge but without the 3rd party arbitration requirement... i
believe pederson commitments could be used), that also has privacy
*and* traceability / provability, with a view to empowering indigenous
tribes on sacred lands across the world (native american indians,
maoris, wherever they are) to become "point of origin" crypto-exchange
and FOREX agents, operating on *sovereign territory within the borders
of western nations*, capable of helping westerners hounded by
govermnents to legitimately be able to tell their local tax
authorities to go f*** themselves.

current crypto-currencies with the exception of monero are based
around the principle of hiding... so of course they are being hunted
and hounded.  monero and i believe grin-coin at least provide both
privacy *and traceability*, such that an individual may *prove* to
their local tax authorities that yes they accepted the transaction,
but that they can also prove that the transaction was completed
*outside of their jurisdiction*.

anyway that's all background.  to the point.

in reading the mimblewimble whitepaper i noticed that it said that
spammers can carry out a denial-of-service attack by flooding the
network with "wrong unspent outputs".  the proposed solution was to
download the blockchain from a torrent or from multiple users.

the question i had in mind was, could checkpoints / breakpoints /
milestones be added (which *do* include a sum of some kind of the
total), without revealing too much information, the general idea being
that the checkpoints can be block-chain-signed by multiple people, and
thus you can download a *SMALL* (fixed, known sized) amount of the
blockchain from any one user (from checkpoint to checkpoint), and if
the sum doesn't add up or they try sending *more* data than is
expected, you know for a fact that they're a spammer and can drop
them.

now that i think of it, this reminds me of the rsync protocol for some
reason... it's not quite the same.

anyway look forward to hearing your thoughts, i have some other
questions however i do not wish to overload you with them, so one at a
time :)

l.