Charlie Lee, founder of Litecoin, 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 spoke of MWEB, or MimbleWImble, as it was called then, in 2019. There have been numerous announcements of promising progress, but all have failed to materialize into a final launch.
It looks like MWEB is right around the corner with Lee confirming an activation date. The journey to get there has been long and drawn out.
Things picked up in mid-February, following the MWEB testnet launch. The updates given by Lead Dev David Burkett had seemingly turned up problem after problem.
The MWEB Progress Update ThreadMWEB Progress Update Thread, which dates back to December 2019, documents the journey. During 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.
Lee started tweeting about MWEB signaling at this time. More than 75% of the miners should signal their approval for an upgrade to occur. Lee gave updates on how the signaling progressed over the next few weeks. 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.
Sound money is durable, portable, divisible, scarce, universally accepted, and fungible.
Cash is the best fit for these characteristics to date. In an effort to digitize sound money, MWEB seeks to address the biggest hurdle facing cryptocurrencies as a payment method.
In an interview in October 2020, Lee said that the only property of sound money missing fromBitcoin and Litecoin is fungibility. He said that the next paradigm would be on this and privacy.
The MWEB upgrade means that the history of the LTC token is obscured, so that each token is indistinguishable from the next. That's how the token was used in the past will not affect its value now.
No identifiable addresses can be linked to outputs by encrypting block inputs and outputs. Only the transacting parties can view the transaction data.