With seventeen days left to register for MWC (registration ends on July 19, 2019), I thought it a good time to write about why Mimblewimble is important and why we have chosen to dedicate so much time and energy into working on it. While in the last few articles, we have written about the profit potential in MWC and other Mimblewimble based coins and how its incorporation into Bitcoin will ultimately benefit Bitcoin holders greatly as well, there is more to it than just making money.
The Bitcoin movement is part of a larger movement that has been fought over the course of generations. After all, Satoshi's birthday on his p2p foundation profile is April 5, which is the day in 1933 that Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the executive order 6102 banning the "hoarding" of gold. Some of us also call it saving, but if you're going to use force against peaceful people, it's better to use terms like hoarding. Clearly, Satoshi spoke in symbols and his choice of birthday was no exception.
And while we've come a long way, the same influences that wanted to ban gold in 1933 want to prevent Bitcoin from incorporating strong anonymity and privacy technology (i.e. Mimblewimble). Just remember, whenever they talk about anonymity, they are talking about Mimblewimble. While it's not being named yet, it will be in the coming months and years as we debate the future of Bitcoin.
Their archetypal spokesman is Craig Wright. Notice lately, he and the other BSV advocates have increasingly been speaking out about how Bitcoin's anonymity is a problem. It's somewhat ironic, since Bitcoin is not, by any means, anonymous. Imagine their reaction should Mimblewimble be implemented in Bitcoin. Clearly they'd be against it. And possibly that should be enough reason for most of us to support it since Wright is sort of an anti-christ like figure in the space.
As we have written before, a cryptocurrency without privacy and fungibility just isn't as good a money as one with those characteristics and when you ask users to be responsible for implementing privacy on their own who are you kidding? During each Bitcoin bull market cycle, we onboard 10X the number of users. None of these new users will even understand why privacy or fungibility is important until much later, when a new wave of entrants join the fray. No, it must be implemented in the base layer of the protocol and on by default if we want to gain any sort of traction.
Every week, there seems to be a new narrative about why Mimblewimble won't work in Bitcoin. The people talking about it usually don't name it by name, but when you try to debate them about it, like I did with Max Hillebrand on Adam Meister's this week in Bitcoin show a few weeks back, they have a set of talking points ready to respond. Back then, the problem with Mimblewimble was that you couldn't do all the smart contracting that can be done in Bitcoin, but wait, do people actually use smart contracts in Bitcoin? The only important one I know of is the lightning network and that works in Mimblewimble. Oh yeah, atomic swaps and multisig work too. Now the narrative has shifted and Mimblewimble is not auditable! I debunked this one yesterday. It's a moving target and it will never end. I wonder what next week's narrative will be?
So, as the lines are drawn, which side of the debate do you want to be on? Are you going to argue against the best privacy/fungibility/scalability technology being implemented in the base layer of Bitcoin? If you are, do you really understand who's benefiting? You might actually be a useful idiot helping promote a narrative that you are ultimately against. Think it through.
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