Please describe the feature you’d like to see added.
Integrate Mimblewimble (MW) as a consensus-friendly sidechain (Grin) or covenant-based extension to Bitcoin to enhance its long-term privacy, fungibility, and scalability. This would provide a trustless, cryptographic safeguard against the systemic risks of transactional surveillance, chain analysis, and the increasing centralization of mining and node operation.
Is your feature related to a problem, if so please describe it.
Bitcoin faces several emergent systemic risks that threaten its core value propositions of censorship-resistance and decentralization:
- Erosion of Fungibility and Privacy: The transparent nature of the blockchain allows for sophisticated chain analysis. This enables third parties (governments, exchanges) to blacklist or devalue coins based on their transaction history, fundamentally undermining Bitcoin’s role as a neutral P2P medium of exchange.
- Centralizing Pressures: The resource intensity of running a full node and the capital requirements for mining are creating centralizing pressures. This is compounded by regulatory efforts to impose KYC/AML on node operatrs and miners, creating potential single points of failure for censorship.
- Scalability and Network Effects: A perpetually growing blockchain creates a high barrier to entry for individual node operators, reducing network decentralization. Furthermore, if large institutions and governments hoard coins without spending them, the network’s utility as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system diminishes and network stalls.
- Censorship Resistance: The current debate **CORE V30 vs Knots deabte** showd that the current system is vulnerable to regulatory pressure on miners and nodes to censor transactions.
Describe the solution you’d like
The solution is to build robust, user-friendly tooling that enables seamless atomic swaps between Bitcoin and Grin. This would involve:
Library Development: Create and standardize open-source libraries for Bitcoin-Grin atomic swaps.
Wallet Integration: Encourage the integration of this capability into major non-custodial Bitcoin wallets, and create synergy with GRIN developers and codebase. Grin Bitcoin fund has enough Bitcoin to fund these.
Node Compatibility: Ensure the solution works with a standard Bitcoin Core node and a Grin node, reinforcing people easily run own nodes. A Grin node is super lightweight, easily runs on an old mobile phne.
This approach allows users to:
Move BTC into the Mimblewimble sidechain (Grin) for private, low-fee, fungible transactions.
Move value back to the Bitcoin blockchain when needed for settlement.
Enjoy enhanced privacy without changing Bitcoin’s fundamental properties.
Describe any alternatives you’ve considered
- Using centralized mixing services or coinjoin: These services r_equire trust_, have privacy limitations, and can be points of failure or censorship. They do not provide the same level of cryptographic privacy guarantees as Mimblewimble
- Relying on Layer-2 solutions like Lightning: While excellent for speed and cost, Lightning has its own privacy trade-offs and complex centralized trust models for channel management. It does not solve the base-layer fungibility issue.
- Do Nothing: Maintaining the status quo accepts the risks of increasing regulatory capture, loss of fungibility, and centralization, potentially leading to a future where Bitcoin is a “settlement layer” controlled by a few permissioned entities, thus betraying its original peer-to-peer vision.
Please leave any additional context
The potential benefits of Mimblewimble integration are;
- Strong Privacy & Fungibility: No addresses, amounts, or transactions visible on blockchain.
- No Metadata/Spam: The blockchain does not permanently store unnecessary data, protecting nodes from CSAM and spam attacks.
- Lightweight Blockchain: The “cut-through” feature leads to a much smaller blockchain, making it easy for anyone to run a full node on low-power devices like old mobile phones, ensuring true decentralization.
This proposal leverages Grin’s existing, live, and functional Mimblewimble blockchain, avoiding the need to build a new sidechain from scratch also.
This is about expanding the Bitcoin ecosystem’s capabilities, not replacing Bitcoin, by creating a synergistic relationship with a complementary privacy protocol.
In the age of AI surveillance with KYC rules, this isn’t a privacy feature missing; it is a fatal design necessity in its monetary function.
