Latest / Monero Talk / Litecoin as a Privacy Coin with MWEB dev David Burkett | EPI 372

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Litecoin as a Privacy Coin with MWEB dev David Burkett | EPI 372 · Monero Talk

• Doug Alright, good morning, good morning. How's it going, man? David Good. How are you? Doug David, thanks for doing this. I'm very excited to talk with you and excited to have you participating at the Monero Topia conference in February. I think it's going to be a great addition to the conference to have a Litecoin privacy representative. I think you'll be welcome there. Don't be worried. I know there's a lot of Monero maxis out there. Speaker 1 They don't scare me I know how tribalism is in this Doug It's an ugly game. It's an ugly game. Before we get into things, it'd be great if you just kind of quickly introduce yourself, give a quick little overview, and then I've got a lot of questions. I'm sure we'll go down a bunch of different paths. Speaker 1 Um, uh, yeah, David Burkett. I was, uh, uh, I created M web, uh, backing, I don't know, a few years ago, uh, it's like cons, like, um, extension block, uh, mimble, wimble implementation before that. I, I, uh, I wrote grin plus plus, which was like a note in wallet for, uh, the grin cryptocurrency, which is like the original mimble, wimble protocol implementation. Um, so I've been doing that stuff for several years now before that, lots of other not so cool stuff. So that's, that's about all there is. Doug I mean, you're a humble guy. That's some pretty big stuff, bro. You know, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're basically the creator of, uh, the privacy tech for Litecoin. You implemented MimbleWimble on Litecoin. You were the lead tab. That's awesome. And before that you worked on MimbleWimble in the form of Grinch. Speaker 1 Yeah, I wrote my own node and wallet implementation. So when Grin came out, it was basically just a little terminal app, just a little command line, Linux only, not very usable things. I went and made a wallet for it, but I wanted to make a bunch of design changes to the node itself. So I decided to just roll my own. Why not? So I wrote my own node and wallet that cross-platformed everything and ended up being the most popular for quite a while until I stepped away, but yeah. Doug And what is kind of your, are you like self-taught or are you just a guy got a crypto and figured out how to. Speaker 1 Yeah, so I mean, I've been I've been interested in Bitcoin since 2011. I was a Ron Paul guy way back. Awesome. So Austrian economics heard about Bitcoin. I was like, this sounds awesome. Didn't buy any. Doug And then we'll start, right, the usual story, right? Yeah. Speaker 1 I did get him get in in 2013, not nearly and I was feeling so not much, but you know enough It was like wow, I made some money. You know, I'm not yeah not living the dream or anything But I did. Yeah, I've been following it for a long time originally mostly interested on the economic side but And I invested 2013 followed it for a few years Then I finally read the white paper in like 2016 and I was like, holy shit This stuff is like I mean it it blew my mind how simple but how like powerful Yeah, it was you back then it was just all theory like what was decentralized. There's no You know, no coordinator or whatever sounds cool But like I had no idea how it worked I would just the case probably with most people who pretend to know what exactly it does but but you know, I finally decided to you know start to dig into the tech and I was you know blown away and then Spent a couple years following and started to look for for ways to contribute and then ended up with Grand eventually in 2019 after some other minor contributions to things and Doug Cool. I mean, it takes some chops to just start working on something like MimbleWimble, right? So you had some cryptography background or just dev background? Speaker 1 Yeah, just a developer. I wrote a lot of C++ code in my previous job. I've been coding since I was very young. Computers are my thing, but no formal crypto background or anything. I know just enough to be dangerous. Doug I guess that's kind of a testament to MimbleWimble that somebody can just kind of start working on it at that point, right? Like it was easy enough to to build with. Speaker 1 Yeah, the original MimbleWimble is actually pretty straightforward. Once you have a good grasp of blockchains, you know, elliptic curves, and that is just some simple building blocks around like Peterson commitments and summing, you know, summing these homomorphic commitments and stuff, but, you know, basic understanding of signatures, things like that stuff, most of the stuff you get from just learning the basics of Bitcoin, and then just put together a clever way. Range proofs are a little more complex, but I didn't even have to do anything there other than, you know, what they do and call a library that's already well-maintained. So, yeah, so, you know, it didn't take a whole lot of crypto dollars to get into it, just the basics, but of course I've learned a lot since then, so now I can come to all kinds of problems. Doug And was it the privacy aspect that got you excited about it? Like, why Mimble-Wimble? Like, why before that, like, were you trying to work out in the narrow and stuff? Or, like... Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, I looked at Monero for a while. I made minor contributions. Oh, you did. Like names is not as not as myself. I'll beat hacks or whatever. But like, yeah, it was the scalable privacy. So the scaling wars, 2017, in the 18, pretty big deal. Bitcoin didn't look like it was going to scale because, you know, suddenly millions of people were going to use it. It didn't happen. At least not L1. But it looked like, you know, scalability was whoever solves that. That's what's going to win. And of course, I was a privacy advocate. I'm a freedom advocate, not necessarily privacy or anything like that. I'm all for making it harder for government intrusion to try to, you know, surveil, to, you know, tax, whatever. Whatever they, whatever those people do. So, you know, privacy is something you should have when transact. Basic privacy. And I don't, not everything, not every transaction has to have Zcash or Monero level privacy, in my opinion. It'd be great if it did. But it doesn't necessarily. But at least you need some kind of basic level of privacy, which Bitcoin was lacking. You know, make a transaction on Bitcoin, suddenly your wallet balance is visible to whoever you're transacting with. It's just not, you know, it's not great stuff. So, I love, you know, I love the idea of adding privacy. And then this, there was this, you know, scalable way to do it, which is really not super scalable. It's like, it's like, you know, it's mostly just an improvement on the initial blockchain download. It comes out like, you know, it's like a third of the time for but it's scalable privacy. It's by far the most scalable privacy solution out there. So, I really like that aspect of it. But it just, you know, it just seemed like something that could like at the time that something that had a need and I was there. And so, I was like, you know, these are things I care about. So, Brin was just a good fit. Yeah. Doug Yeah, it was like new exciting tech and you thought you thought you could make a contribution there and start to help out and make an impact. And so did you also, you mentioned the scalability issues with Bitcoin, did you also see Bitcoin's transparency as like a major issue to what it was trying to do? Speaker 1 Yeah. Satoshi always advertises it as pseudonymous, which is what it is. But people quickly, early on, reinterpreted that as anonymous and you had the Silk Road. I've been on the Silk Road. I never bought anything, but I remember back then, check it out. Doug Research purposes only. Speaker 1 research purpose. I mean, I'm not a drug guy. So there wasn't much there for me. But it was cool. I wanted to see it. And yeah, and just crazy to me that the people were, you know, using this basically transparent, you know, ledger there, to purchase these things, sending I don't even know, like, I don't even know how people get that stuff. Like, what do you send it to your home address? Do you send it to your neighbors? How does that work? I don't know. It's crazy that people were using that site and stuff. But but but it's clear, it was clear to me that like, Bitcoin doesn't have the basic privacy that you need in order to be in, you know, a day to day currency, something you're gonna be receiving your paychecks in something you're gonna be transacting with, you know, something that you want to evade evade taxes with, because you know, what is Bitcoin, but, you know, black market money, I see, you know, that's its original main purpose, right? Black market money, that's not easy to inflate away, right? Those were like, it's too big. You know, it's not sensible. It's not. It's not, you know, it's finite in amount. So like, those were two big qualities. So having it, you know, transparent, just easy to follow is an obvious, like, problem with the protein was like, I saw the need. Doug And it sounds like you were always pretty coin agnostic right like you never were like a Bitcoin maxi you were just Speaker 1 I was a Bitcoin maxi before that was a thing, like I, you know, kind of followed like their Eric those skills or whatever you say his name, like that kind of pathway 2013, I was like, ah, this, you know, this Litecoin scan, you know, and all these others that were out there, it's just pump and dump garbage, whatever. But then, like, some of them started making cool stuff. Monero had a pretty rocky early start, but like, the tech was pretty cool. I was very skeptical. I mean, I bought a little bit way back, but like, I was very skeptical of like, the currency itself, because of, you know, the early mining and whatever, I don't know, history is probably all fun, but I don't, I don't care. I mean, I was interested in the tech, and it was cool to see some things. Zcash was really cool to me. Zcash has its obvious problems, but just to see how like, you know, impressive the tech could be when with these altcoins working on things. And so I slowly, you know, gradually started to, you know, change my, my views on things. And then, of course, the Bitcoin maxi thing came out by that time I, you know, already realized that, you know, Bitcoin had scalable scalability issues and transparency issues like other coins, we need other solutions out there. So yeah, my Bitcoin maxi era was very early and very short lived. And pretty much since then, it's been pretty coin agnostic. I like tech, you know, for the tech in it for the anti-government money. Doug So what things are you most interested in now? Obviously, Litecoin, Mimble, Wimble, but are there other projects that you're still excited about? Speaker 1 Well, the full chain membership proofs, of course, for Monero, that's many of the privacy coins have found their unlikeability solution in the past few years, and it's been fun to watch CD advantages, disadvantages of each approach. And each one seems to be getting better and better, obviously. And it's to the point where I can't grasp it fully, not without spending hours and hours digging into this stuff. I know I'm just good enough at math that I can fumble my way through a paper with lots of time, but not so much that I can contribute in any meaningful way to these crazy things. But it's definitely like the full chain membership proofs. I'm glad that like Monero scales so terribly as is right now. And I'm really glad to see that there's better solutions in the future. So that's pretty, yeah. And yeah, there's been like Firo was, yeah, if you're sorry, I didn't realize we'd say there are. Maybe it is Firo. I don't know. Doug Oh, that was called a thera. Speaker 1 I already talked to the guys that right at night, I, but I'm, you know, I felt just typing. I never, I don't actually talk to people. I don't get out much. But, all right, Fira, we'll go with that. So yeah, you know, they have their, their equivalent for their membership proofs. The name, LeLantis, I think it is, or Prophecy St, not ... Doug Yeah, a little ant to spark or I think it might be something else at this point. I might be yeah Speaker 1 Well, yeah, I saw the early proposals and stuff, and so it's just been good to see like these primitive privacy approaches being replaced with these newer, larger anonymity set versions that scale better and everything else. Lots of good advantages there. So it's cool to see that. I wish we could do something like that on Litecoin. People ask me if it's a privacy coin. It's not a privacy one. Litecoin has. We're now providing just enough privacy, like the basic level of privacy of what you need to be a parent. If we could do all this other stuff simply, if we could move to something like that in a simple, scalable way, that'd be great. Maybe we will someday. But at the time, we had these basic needs, and money should be, the amounts should be hidden. You should have confidential transactions, and you should not see the address for use and things like that. So we had these basic privacy requirements, and we wanted to do it in a way that has scaled effectively the same as current transactions. And so that's how we came up with and maybe in the future, we'll have something even better. And I hope you do. And I hope someone else writes it. David Ah. Doug You ready to retire over there? Speaker 1 I'm so old that I know at least I feel it anyways. Doug I know, man. I can't believe how much time, you know, how much of my life was spent in crypto at this point, right? Yeah. Manchu, I guess. A relatively young man when I, you know, it was a bit of lifetime. Speaker 1 like me and this is what I did with it. Yeah. Doug it's it's making it it's going to make a big impact if it hasn't already i think you know i think we're doing big things um so let's let's get into it more that so you so you're saying you wouldn't really categorize litecoin as a privacy coin per se even though it has i mean Speaker 1 do. It's definitely got more privacy than Bitcoin. It's opt-in. That's obviously problematic for serious privacy fanatics. And it doesn't provide the same level of unmetability as Monero's eCash Bureau, the others. Anyone monitoring the peer-to-peer network in its current form can basically see where the inputs and outputs go. You don't get the address you use. You don't get the amount. So it's harder to analyze what's going on in the way you can't Bitcoin. But it's like privacy. It's like the minimum level of privacy. It gets you to the minimum requirements of what you use. Doug And so everybody understands. And so I understand too, like, so I, my, my recollection of it, I remember like, so basically it has confidential transactions. So the amounts are obfuscated. The receiver, I think you like, right. It has stealth addresses, receivers obfuscated, but the sender is an obfuscate. It doesn't have like a. Speaker 1 I don't know if that's how I would say yeah. Well, I guess so I guess so sort it depends like so you're thinking from the Manero as but yeah You will just on this one this one or one of these other leaven or sainty or whatever the anonymity said is now Yes in that aspect. There's just one the anonymity said was just one okay, you know and so, you know you get better on like ability than Bitcoin because like these You know, they're easier to coin join together you don't like Bitcoin It's a lot more obvious which ones change which one's not because you have like the amounts the amounts can be are You know heavily used by things like chain analysis to determine which ones change which ones I'm not You know even amounts being sent is an obvious spread flag that this is being sent to the receiver and this is the change back Things like that. So that helps break up thing But we know there's non-interactive coin joins done at the protocol level and could be done There's there's things like coin swap, which are these, you know, just like a service that it's like a multi-party Service that can like you can submit transactions to well You're more not necessarily transaction You submit your current coin and like a wrapped version of a new coin that the several different servers unwrapped piece by piece and then you they end up like Sending your old coin to the new coin without knowing without being able to see the link in between As long as one of them is honest and you know You can end up with this big transaction where all of these coins that people submit are swapped for their other new coins And that helps break up anonymity and you can do all kinds of really cool things like I'm like a second layer with mimble-mimble because of how flexible the protocol is But but the pure basic mimble-mimble like without any added, you know Sugar on top there is just you know, you broadcast the transaction as is With the amounts hidden II and no addresses no and risk reuse thinking like that And so you can see where the inputs go to the outputs if you're monitoring the peer-to-peer blockchain Doug And right if you're running like a malicious node or something, right? Yeah Speaker 1 I mean, really just adding a log statement to your current, yeah, it doesn't take a lot to see that. But, you know, if you go look at the history, it's gone, it's not gone. It's just that it's joined together with all the other transactions in the block. So, you know, the more transactions, you know, the more obfuscation going on there. But yeah, you can, you can monitor the big weakness and then bilingual has always been that you can monitor your network and learn at least the links. Would you never, may not be enough to do something depending on who, what your threat level is? Your, yeah. Doug Right, right, right, right. It's an attack vector. Yeah, I'm just right. Yeah Speaker 1 And it's better than not something you have to worry about your ex, you know, performing or something like that. But you know, if you're trying to buy these drugs on, you know, Silk Road 3.0 or whatever right now, like, maybe that's not the best choice. It's more for, you know, the big gain there is we have a scalable way of hiding amounts to where you're not going around with each transaction, advertising your network. Doug Yeah, that's you know, that's why I wrote it off as a Monero person and I'm not super technical but this was listening to others in the space is like, oh, okay, it's not it's not it's cool. It has a scalability feature that makes it, like you said, more scalable in terms of other privacy coins, but it's not perfect privacy. It's kind of a Monero Speaker 1 of sepal have a way of way of like, you know, saying Z cash isn't private enough, even though it's clearly like, you know, yeah, ignoring the many, many problems with the Z cash foundation corporation would all that right? You know, the the protocol itself that that that actual tech the crypto there, assuming it's actually, you know, assuming it's safe, who knows you have to be one of the 12 scientists or whatever understand it. But assuming it's actually, you know, actually safe, insecure, it's incredible privacy, it's about as good as it gets, you know, but Manero people are like, Oh, like, you know, you know, I could that's transparent, may as well be transparent, you know, and I Doug Yeah, yeah, no, I'm one of these guys. I think one of those guys believe it or not Like cuz I just I agree with you like I've watched as you get my my major criticism never be happy Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean yeah, I think it's like you look silly when you say Zcash isn't private It's it's the standard now. It's not private by default. That's you know, that's That is a criticism you can law about it and that makes it actually kind of similar to Litecoin Mimblewimble, right? They've kind of both have their shielded pool, right? They Speaker 1 I think Zcash is more default shielded these days. You can have your shielded only address and stuff. There's not like, I mean, yeah, I guess they're similar in that aspect. Of course, when you shield it, like, mWeb is not a mixer. So, like, a lot of what a lot of people like to do with mWeb is they'll pick the coins and they'll hang in, as we call it, move them from Litecoin, like, the main chain to the extension block, mWeb, and then they'll leave it sit there a little bit and then they'll send it right back out, which will go peg out. And you gain nothing but. And they think that they have. And it's a serious problem. It's not a mixer. Whereas with Zcash, you probably could do that. And you would probably, you know, you could go from your transparent pool to your shielded pool, leave it there for some period of time, some minimum period of time, and then move it back. And you could, you know, as long as you're not moving the exact same amount back or whatever. Yeah, you would gain a lot more privacy from doing that with Zcash than you would mWeb. mWeb is not a good mixer because of the reason you can follow those coins. You know, you may not know the amounts while they're in there and stuff, but you can follow, you know, like, you know, and especially if you're not transacting at all, if you just peg in, peg in as a direct late game, it points to the kernel, like you can see the output mostly, you could probably find the output pretty easily. And then to see it, peg right back out with a similar amount, of course, it would have been worse. You know, it's not a it's not a good mixer. And unfortunately, some people like to think it is. But yeah, I don't know where I was really going with this, but because Zcash is a little bit better off in that aspect in which you're right. Yeah, it does actually work as a decent mixer as long as you're not doing stupid things like setting yourself up for timing tax, you're doing it a block later, or not doing, you know, similar amount, you know, attacks or whatever. Doug Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like you said, so is it the intention of Litecoin to become more private and to, you know, get to that point where it is similar to like a Speaker 1 I can't speak for Litecoin. I would love more privacy. I think the more privacy we can add without changing the cryptographic assumptions, without severely increasing complexity, and without affecting scalability, then I would love to. I hope in the future that we can find some perfect solution for us. But for now, it needs our needs, I think. Doug What would a potential solution even look like, because it would be like an overall overhaul of the whole thing, or it's like some kind of tech that could be added just to fix the, you know, this, I would say central center. Speaker 1 Honestly, I think it would need an overall if we're going to make significant gains in privacy. I don't know that you could really bolt on anything to end web to make it like you actually know, maybe, maybe, but nothing really comes to mind. I don't really have the best imagination. I like to follow cool tech. Things blow my mind all the time, but I can never predict what's going to happen. It's just like it happens. It's like, oh yeah, I should have seen that coming. Thank you. Doug And the other thing that stuck out of my mind about NimbleWimble was that it required sender and receiver to basically use it live, right? It was interactive, right. You could send it to a static address. Speaker 1 MWeb you can't, MWeb you can't. So MWeb we solved that. Wimble, Wimble, Grin, and original Beam involved interactive transactions. It's called where the seller and receiver of all this have to communicate out of band somehow to build the transaction together. That's no longer the case. MWeb, we have one-sided send to address. We have stealth sub-addresses built basically off the same design for sub-addresses that Monero uses. Tevador actually, probably saying that wrong, one of the contributors to Monero, he actually made a proposal for one-sided transactions. Like to Grim, I had already had my own proposals at that time which we ended up implementing MWeb but part of his proposal had spelled out this really awesome way of doing stealth sub-addresses in a very secure way. So I snagged that up right away and added that in. It was like perfect time. And so I put that in and we gained from all of his knowledge there. And yeah, so we got, we have pretty much the same stealth sub-address system that Monero does. Also, so yeah, it's one-sided. There's no, none of the problems, none of the usability issues of Grin. That was really Grin's big like Gilly Seal. The privacy, a weakness would be the peer-to-peer monitoring but like the thing that really affected it aside from maybe like the economics of it all. It'd be trying to flare, launch, trying to, well, even if you ignore the inflation, even if it was a finite amount, they tried to fair launch in 2021, which, or whatever it was. And it just is too late, 2020, maybe 2019, I don't know. It was too late, like, you know, it's obviously, like, I would love for you to still be able to fair launch or coin, but like the way, you know, attention spans work these days and the investors and the pups and dumps and all that, like to get any kind of like, you know, to see any kind of price action, positive price action early on, you have to, nowadays have to have like a pre-mine or something. And so, yeah, and it didn't help that they had basically constant emission forever. There's no, like, it's not like a front noted emission, kind of like the narrow. I would have, I actually advocated for that, but I was too late to really sway anyone, to have like a, you know, a finite early, like, emission and then like a tail emission, just to kind of deal with that. I would have much rather had something like that, just too late. But anyhow, I ramble a lot. The whole point I was getting at was there, their big other issue was usability, which was, you know, having to build those transactions with the receiver and it caused all kinds of problems. They basically got delisted from every exchange, every new exchange. It's really hard to work with. And I think it was kind of a buggy implementation too. I think it's improved a lot since then, but it's just, it had a very rocky start for usability and it just, people couldn't use it. Doug Yeah, yeah. Actually, I don't want to give away too much, but we're considering... I don't know if you're familiar with XMR Bazaar. Have you seen XMR Bazaar at all? It's a Manero-based marketplace for legal goods and services, but you could be completely anonymous and it's all Manero-based. So we're considering making a sister website that would feed off the same database, whatever, but that we would add additional privacy coins. And so Litecoin, MimbleWimble, is on the list of potentials. And from what you're saying, I mean, today, that should be something that's relatively easy to do. It will work in that regard. Speaker 1 Yeah, lots of Monero wallets, or not lots. A few Monero-based wallets, like Cake wallet, of course, implemented, and Web as well, and stuff. So yeah, it's, yeah. Doug And they don't need to meet the sender and receiver don't need to be on at the same size they have Speaker 1 There's otherwise a crazy it's still the similar protocols, you know, you still scan the blockchain in basically the same way as a scenario, you still, you know, you still transact in basically the same way. Addresses are basically the same generation. So yeah. Doug And from a user perspective then, so what is it like going in between a regular Litecoin and MimbleWimble? Is it kind of just seamless? It's just you're sending a regular Litecoin address versus a shielded one or whatever you want to call it? Speaker 1 Yeah, I spent a lot of time making sure we got that right, because it would have been a major hurdle to try to have to, like originally we thought maybe we were going to have to peg in to our own address, to our own wallet, and then send, or do a double transaction or something. But I really worked on it to make sure that we got pretty much as seamless as possible. There is a, when we peg out, there's like a six block maturity rule that we did for security reasons to like avoid issues around reorgs. There's a similar thing for like Coinbase transactions, like what miners mine, they have to wait like, they have to wait like 140 some locks or whatever, like a long period of time before they can spend those coins. With peg outs, we have a six block maturity, which is about 15 minutes on Litecoin, just to help avoid issues with reorgs that would cause like transaction IDs to change, given how it's peg outs work. But to the average user, ignoring that aspect, if you send to an N Web address, it will do the pegging in for you if there's not already N Web addresses, or N Web coins available. And then if you have a regular Litecoin address you want to send to, and you only have your coins pegged to the N Web, it will peg out for you just that amount. Try to keep, do things in the most private way possible while maintaining that simple send to address, like seamless feel that everybody's used to. So yeah. Doug So the paging and de-paging is happening kind of automatically in the back. Speaker 1 Well, a lot of you just won't know if they're not using coin control or something like that. They probably don't know whether it's even happening or not. Doug So in terms of memorabilia, anything else to cover in terms of basic architecture? Those are the biggest things in my mind. It's exciting to hear that that's been solved, that it's no longer interactive. Like you said, the sniffer nodes is a thing that's a real threat, but it depends on what you're, who you are, what you're trying to do with it. If you're just Joe Schmo and you're using it on whatever, some legal marketplace, you shouldn't have a concern. But yeah, any other major things to cover with regards to text? Speaker 1 So most people aren't probably too familiar with how extension blocks actually work. As far as I know, it's like the only major quality that uses an extension block. They were originally proposed in like 2016, 2015 as a way to increase the block size as a software, I think. And the way they basically work is because you have your standard block with your standard transactions. And then you have this separate block of data with transactions of any form. You can make any protocol change, basically. You want any change to the transaction structure. And include all those transactions outside the block, but you commit to them in the block. So it's almost like this parallel chain that goes along with the standard blockchain. And so the way things work is when you want to peg in a coin from the Litecoin side to let the M1 side, you basically send it to this special address that commits to your transaction on the M1 side. And then miners in every block will grab all those special outputs, and it will spend them in the last transaction in the block. It's called the integrating transaction. And it kind of moves those coins. It kind of like locks them up on the main chain side and then commits to the entire second block, or extension block. It's like we have complete flexibility in what those roles could look like with those transactions. Unlike on traditional Litecoin or Bitcoin, there's the limits to what you can do with standard software. But with an extension block, you can make any protocol changes we wanted, which is how we would actually implement Mibble & Bold, which is quite a bit different than standard Litecoin and Bitcoin. And so yeah, when you peg in, it just sends it to a special address. It spends it in the special transaction, and it just locks them off on the main chain. And then you get those equivalent amount on that separate block that goes in parallel, committed to by the main block, but it's just an extra block of data. It's sort of like SegWit. SegWit is like this additional block of witness data that is committed to by the coin-based transaction. This is, instead of just witness data, it's like full transactions of a different form being committed to not by the coin-based, but by the last transaction in a block. So it's similar in that aspect, but a little different as well. So those are probably the big things. Obviously, Mibble & Bold was quite a bit different than what people are used to, but then extension blocks are like the other big tech thing that people probably mostly aren't familiar with. Doug And so, I mean, are there other things that this will evolve into, like, other than adding privacy and, like you said, it adds some scalability? Are there other things that can be done with this that will improve Litecoin? Speaker 1 Uh, probably I don't know Doug I don't I don't know or even like like confidential ass like putting it like confidential assets. That's all Speaker 1 Papas, well, there's there's ways to do in like colored porn you have potential assets and all that stuff that stuff all been worked out for for traditional nimble nimble there's You could do full like atomic swaps and things like that There's scriptless scripts that you know That that were designed for nimble nimble And and there's like you could do a full second layer on there with with payment channels and things like that There's all kinds of areas that people could you know research and build things on No immediate plans to do any of that stuff because we have similar Aspects on you know maintain with the exception of maybe atomic swaps It'd be really cool to atomic swap from Mike and web to Monero and vice-versa. Yeah, yeah I think that would be really great and and it's definitely possible There's people who have looked at it. I don't know If anyone has like a working implementation or anything like that, but it's that would be one very cool thing I would like to see But like all the others like we could do a full-blown lightning network on the M web Like we already have lightning network that nobody uses on the main chain. So we don't need another one. No one uses But yeah, there's a lot you could build it to it's pretty flexible It's even nwebs even more flexible than nimble nimble To a degree like this. There's different trait. We made off a lot of different trade-offs that That pure simple nimble nimble is like a very Mathematically fancy like, you know, just I don't know. It's just Mathematical very very elegant solution and webs like the sloppy, you know second cousin that like Whatever. It's good. There's a lot It's not a beautiful mathematical solution is ripped Doug Sometimes that sloppy second cousin ends up doing better than the perfectionist, right? Speaker 1 Yeah, you know, people crap and all the time, you know, chasing the perfection. We are not perfect. But we are very pragmatic in all of the solutions we chose. Yeah. At least we Doug And you're used, you're actually used compared to rights to others, right? Can you give us some insight into the usage? Like, what can we gather? Speaker 1 Uh, so definitely a lot of coins on him. Uh, the last I checked it was like, uh, yeah, 365,000 Litecoin or pegged it at the, at currently, but a lot of those are like big transfection. You know, whales peg in their whole balance. Probably not even realizing it. Maybe not realizing it. Maybe intentionally doing it. Um, as far as transactions go, we're still a little light. Um, I'd love to see a lot more usage because we really gain that privacy from, from having, you know, you can't really hide in a crowd of one. This is what I always like to say. You know, we, we like to see in order to gain, uh, that any unlikeability, uh, even, you know, even historical unlikeability and like ignoring the fact that you could just monitor peer to peer, uh, protocol, like to be able to like obscure at least the history from someone who doesn't have that, you know, those daily logs, uh, you, you really need transactions, lots of transactions, more of the merrier. And we don't have, we're not there yet. We really just started to get implemented on third party wallets. Not a lot of users use Litecoin core. And so we, you know, in the past year, year and a half, we've seen a lot of third party wallets, uh, adopt ember. So I expect that to tick up over time, the usage, um, and, uh, what we're really lacking right now too is like, um, services and exchanges that actually support it. We've had issues with like exchanges. Like if you peg out, you know how I mentioned, we can automatically peg out, just give a regular Litecoin transaction. If you have M web coins, we'll just peg out and send to it. Well, that actually turned out to be somewhat of a problem because, uh, like Binance and a couple others decided that, uh, coins coming directly from the M web, those peg out transactions, they're not going to accept them. So there's kind of left in limbo there. Like these coins are technically owned by Binance and, um, but they're not crediting the user for them and they're just sitting there. Doug I'm sorry, you're saying somebody, users, can you explain that again? Speaker 1 Yeah, so I mentioned if you have mWebcoins and you send to a traditional Litecoin address, we peg out. So some exchanges have decided to be overly cautious on like, I don't know, KYC reasons or whatever, just, you know, they went. Doug Just that of delisted Monero, right? Speaker 1 Exactly, they went overboard and so they some of them have decided they won't accept coins coming directly from the M web So those paid out of homes So users have to go through support and I don't know what happens with that I'm assuming they send them back somehow or whatever, but they won't credit their account with that. So That you know, that's been a bit of a shock Doug These are users that are kind of like accidentally sending from their shielded Amazon. Speaker 1 That's the big issue with making it seamless is suddenly people don't even realize they're sending MWeb to Litecoin near to the main chain. They're pegging out, and then services are not allowing these pegouts. They're not accepting them. It's like not accepting a certain type of transaction. Oh, we're not going to accept SegWit v2, whatever, transaction or something. And so that's an obvious problem. Once again, I don't know how I got on this topic or what I was getting at. But yeah, so we need exchanges. The support end went fully. Right now we have the opposite where some of them do anything they can to avoid MWeb. But if you peg out to yourself and spend it, it's not like they're worried about the history being an MWeb transaction or having MWeb history. But they won't accept coins directly from it. And what we really need for usage though is them to have MWeb addresses advertised on their deposit addresses. And we want merchants to accept MWeb coins when you're buying from them. So I think the big focus over the next couple of years is going to be, in addition to continuing to encourage third party wallets to support it, is to try to get some of these big services that everyone uses designed to support MWeb as well. And I think that's where you'll see usage really take off. Doug Awesome. And Litecoin has traditionally always done a good job with that, right? Kind of integrating, you know, making partnerships, deals, right, with the big players. Yeah. Speaker 1 Yeah, we've got, you know, there's a few few people very dedicated like on foundation who are really good at that outreach working with companies to Say you have to really you know support to really use our stuff You could see usages through the route with like coin it's get you know It's used more than Bitcoin for for transactions if you look at it, you know Like Bitcoin, you know bit pay things like that like like coins the go-to when you're transacting It's like the go-to currency Doug Sheldon tipped .001 XMR. Good morning guys. Yes, send your Monero based super chats to XMR chat.com slash Monero talk If you have any questions for David Yeah, let's let's get into that a little little bit more Let me quickly play a quick Monero topia ad to get you excited about the Monero topia conference Which you'll be attending and then we'll we'll get back into it. Here we go. Here we go David Do you love coffee and Monero as much as we do? Consider making gratuitous.org your daily cup. Pay with Monero for premium fresh beans and if you like what you taste, send a digital cash tip directly to the farmers that made it possible. Proceeds help us grow this channel, gratuitous and Monero. Doug All right, it's coming up fast. It's coming up fast. And guys, if you want your VIP tickets, grab them because we only have a few left. Those will be sold out. Other tickets you should be able to get, no problem. But yeah, excited for that. Excited that David will be coming down. Obviously excited for your talk, but then to also hopefully maybe I could get you on a panel. If you'd be down for that, we could get guys from a couple of other competing projects and talk about the pros and cons of each. I'm looking forward to that. Speaker 1 I LARP as an expert on anything. The last time there was in Mexico and it was the only time I was in Mexico. I was put on a panel about Bitcoin mining in Central America. I had never been to Central America before. So, well, there I was, isn't there? You'll fit right in. You'll fit right in. He could put me on stage. Doug You'll come up with something. No, but honestly, I'm looking, you know, you are the Litecoin privacy guy. Right. So looking forward to hearing you interact with, you know, some of these other projects and what you guys see is that the pros and cons of each. But let maybe that is a good topic to kind of close it out on. We touched on it a little bit, you know, like Zcash, where do you see Litecoin fitting in, you know, compared to Monero, Zcash, any other things that you consider worthy privacy coin projects, like, or and overall, like, what do you kind of see as the value proposition of Litecoin? Like, I feel like with Monero, it's very clear, right? It's the default private digital cash coin, right? If you got to go do something, you know, and your privacy first, you should you should use Monero, you might want to have a bag of Monero. Where do you see like, what is the value proposition in your mind of Litecoin, especially given that it has some of these privacy features? Speaker 1 Adoption, it's money, very useful, and now, minimal privacy, meets the bar. It's not a price going, like I said, Monero's a go-to there, Zcash, if you're into experiments, but yeah, Litecoin's all about usage. It's trying to be money, digital money. Doug And any other insights you could give us into what Litecoin might do to increase its usage? Like you said, continuing to make these partnerships, especially for the nWeb aspect, getting exchanges to use nWeb instead of traditional Litecoin. But anything else maybe coming down the pipe that will help grow Litecoin and Litecoin usage as cash, as digital cash? Let us know in the comments below. Thank you very much. Speaker 1 Um, I'd be the last to know though if it's because it's not something I like I like myself in a room Doug You're in the trenches with EMLEV. Speaker 1 I write code, that's all I do. I don't do people, I like people. I'm very good with them. So yeah, I know what I'm good at and I know what I'm not. And so we have other people who do our way better at that. And they do good stuff. They're always, the outreach is, we have David Schwartz and now, I mean, there's all kinds of people. We're always reaching out, they're always working with others and I'm not one. They pull me in, it was a technical question. So I could tell you what I'm working on, but it's, we've already covered it. Doug And then any further insight you want to give us into like Monero versus Zcash versus anything else you consider a serious privacy coin project. Just you know obviously been in the space a long time you are highly technical. How do you how do you compare these things. Speaker 1 I think when Monero gets full-chain membership proofs, it's going to be the de facto privacy. I mean, it's already the go-to privacy coin, but I think it's going to be hard to make an argument against it at that point because it's got better cryptography assumptions than ZDCash. You don't have to be one of the anointed scientists to understand it. And it's going to have the level of the unlinkability that you need to really be truly private when transacted, and of course, private by default. So yeah, I think when we get there, there's pretty much Monero's going to be perfect at privacy. I don't know what the scalability or the quantum resistance and all that looks like. Yeah. Protocols change some, but I think it'll be really cool. I mean, it'll be really good. It'll be the best. Doug uh yeah i was gonna ask you about the like the quantum resistance stuff is that something you have an opinion on in terms of you know like and now Speaker 1 Sorry about it at all. I think we have a long time. MWeb, we have built-in switches that when it comes down the line, we can self-work in a quick little fix. And we get protection from all of our past coins. We just start to require a little bit more of a proof we're spending to make sure it's quantum resistant. But I don't think it's a... I think Zcash maybe pumping is what led to all this crazy discussion of it. Or maybe like the Google, like their recent advancements, but 100 qubits to thousands of qubits. And I think that's a bigger leap than most people realize. And we're a long way from having to worry about it. Doug Probably. Yeah, I think Vitalik has been talking about it as well. So that's, you know, putting on people's rights. Speaker 1 Is he, is he like not concerned or no? Oh, you know, I think the one he's in. Doug Well, yeah, I think he's saying like guys, I think maybe actually it's time to be a little Speaker 1 or smarter than me. So if he's concerned, but I haven't been concerned yet. Doug All right, Matt, I mean, this is great. We covered a lot of ground. Like I said, super excited to have you down there. You know, maybe you talk to some people, we get M web to Monero atomic swaps going that would be that would be awesome if that somehow came out of the conference with discussions. But yeah, super excited to have you. You want to any any other information you want to put out there and obviously, where people can find you if they're interested in the things you've been saying or if they're interested in getting involved in Litecoin and all that stuff. Shill it, man. Shill it. I know it's on your own. Speaker 1 internet, Google me. Um, if you can check the Manera link, you tag me. Um, that is Twitter's probably the way to go or telegram. Just my name, David Burkett, t.me slash David Burkett. Um, and yeah, that either of those would be a big way to go hold to me. And I have nothing to show. Um, yeah, but thanks for having me. Yeah. Doug I really really enjoyed this convo. We covered a lot and enjoy your genuine and humble nature. It goes a long way in the Monero community. It sounds like you know you are a guy that's just kind of in it for the tech. You're working on making Litecoin more private and usable. So kudos to you man. Thank you for the work you're doing. Yeah. Thank you. All right. And we'll leave it at that. And I'll see you soon man. I'll see you in like two months or less. Yeah. All right. Adios. David Hi, Monero Land. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to our show on YouTube, Odyssey, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Go to MoneroTalk.Live for a full list of places where you can watch and listen. If you want to interact with us, guests, or other podcast listeners, you can follow us on Twitter, Mastodon, or any of our social media platforms. MoneroTalk is also made possible from contributions by viewers and listeners like you. And supporting us is easier than ever. By typing in MoneroTalk.Crypto in your Monero.com or cake wallet send address field to send us a tip. Once again, thanks so much for listening and we look forward to being back next week.