Why did Litecoin’s MWEB upgrade take so long to roll out?

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Lite­coin founder Char­lie Lee tweet­ed an esti­mat­ed go-live date of May 19, at 20:30 PT, for the long-await­ed MWEB upgrade. He signed off by prompt­ing pools and min­ers, who haven’t already upgrad­ed, to do so in preparation.

Lee first spoke of MWEB, or Mim­bleWIm­ble as it was called then, in 2019. Since then, there have been numer­ous announce­ments of promis­ing progress, but all have failed to mate­ri­al­ize into a final launch.

With Lee con­firm­ing an acti­va­tion date, it looks like MWEB is right around the cor­ner. But the jour­ney in get­ting there has been long and drawn out.

Litecoin MWEB is go

Things began pick­ing up in mid-Feb­ru­ary, fol­low­ing the MWEB test­net launch. But pri­or to that, the updates giv­en by Lead Dev David Bur­kett had seem­ing­ly turned up prob­lem after problem.

The MWEB Progress Update Thread, which dates back to Decem­ber 2019, doc­u­ments the jour­ney. Right around Feb­ru­ary, Bur­kett was talk­ing about bug fix­es. March was sim­i­lar, with Bur­kett ‘play­ing whack-a-mole’ in resolv­ing issues with the wal­let trans­ac­tion list, min­er crash­es, and ‘sub­tract fee from amount’ function.

At this time, Lee began tweet­ing about MWEB sig­nal­ing. For an upgrade to occur, more than 75% of the min­ers should sig­nal their approval for imple­men­ta­tion. Over the fol­low­ing weeks, Lee gave updates on how the sig­nal­ing pro­gressed. But it wasn’t until April 14 that con­sen­sus was reached.

A five-week acti­va­tion peri­od from that date takes us to this week for rollout.

What is MWEB?

The char­ac­ter­is­tics of sound mon­ey are that it is durable, portable, divis­i­ble, scarce, uni­ver­sal­ly accept­ed, and fungible.

To date, cash best fits these char­ac­ter­is­tics. But in an attempt to dig­i­tize the con­cept of sound mon­ey, MWEB seeks to address the most sig­nif­i­cant hur­dle fac­ing cryp­tocur­ren­cies as a pay­ment method, fungibility.

In an inter­view in Octo­ber 2020, Lee said the only prop­er­ty of sound mon­ey miss­ing from Bit­coin and Lite­coin is fun­gi­bil­i­ty. He added that the next par­a­digm would be on this and privacy.

The MWEB upgrade means the his­to­ry of the LTC tokens is obscured so that each token is indis­tin­guish­able from the next. That way, how a token was used in the past will not affect its val­ue now.

Equal­ly, no iden­ti­fi­able address­es can be linked to their respec­tive out­puts by encrypt­ing block inputs and out­puts. Mean­ing only the trans­act­ing par­ties can view the trans­ac­tion data.



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