Litecoin’s 5th anniversary, more exciting things to come

Author: Little Lion from Litecoin China Community

In the blink of an eye, five years have passed since the birth of Litecoin in October 2011. During these five years, Litecoin has experienced ups and downs and has also grown. This year seems to be an important time node for Litecoin. After many years, Litecoin founder Charlie Lee has returned and led the Litecoin development team into a new stage of rapid development. Litecoin has also gradually gained more and more recognition: Coinbase's GDAX launched Litecoin some time ago, Apple officially included Litecoin in the officially recognized currency, and Ledger and Jaxx, two major wallet manufacturers, have also begun to support Litecoin. Ledger has also launched a commemorative edition hardware wallet with a global limit of 500 on the fifth anniversary of Litecoin. Friends who are interested in collecting can keep an eye on Ledger's commemorative edition release information, or subscribe to the official Weibo of the Litecoin Chinese community to get first-hand information.

In 2016, when Charlie Lee returned to the Litecoin development team, the team also added five outstanding developers, injecting fresh blood into the Litecoin development team. I believe that the increasingly powerful Litecoin kernel development team will be able to bring more amazing results to everyone in the future.

Here, the Litecoin China community sincerely thanks everyone for your support for Litecoin over the past five years!

In order to enable domestic users to obtain the latest developments of Litecoin better and faster, the Litecoin China Community will work with the Litecoin kernel development team to continuously provide everyone with first-hand information about Litecoin.

The person who brought the latest information about Litecoin is Dr. Xinxi Wang, the founder of Bitcoin options trading platform Coinut.com and a graduate of the National University of Singapore, who is a new partner of the Litecoin development team. Today, let’s talk about the confidential transactions of Litecoin.

“As a successful electronic currency, Litecoin has many advantages over its predecessor Bitcoin, such as faster transaction confirmation time, almost no blockchain congestion, and no pre-mining. We all know that every Litecoin transfer record includes at least one input record and one output record, and now these input and output records are publicly visible. This will bring privacy issues and potential convertibility issues.”

In order to make Litecoin a more attractive digital currency, Dr. Wang Xinxi said that the team decided to add the confidential transaction function to Litecoin.

Dr. Wang Xinxi also gave a simple explanation of the basic idea of ​​confidential transactions, which is to use a method called Pedersen commitment to hide the amount of Litecoin contained in each input and output while ensuring that the total amount of Litecoin input and output are equal. Dr. Wang Xinxi also provided corresponding references for specific details. Readers can refer to the references [1,2,3] provided at the end of the article to learn about the relevant content.

According to Aaron van Wirdum's article "Confidential Transactions: How Hiding Transaction Amounts Increases the Secrecy of Bitcoin Transactions" published in Bitcoin Magazine in January this year, confidential transactions only require a soft fork, so the entire deployment only requires consensus from miners, and in this way, the new Litecoin kernel can also be backward compatible. Therefore, confidential transactions are also the most practical way to upgrade the anonymity of Litecoin.

Ring Signatures, mentioned in "Ring Confidential Transactions" released by Monero Research Lab and "How to Give Away Secrets" released by MIT Computer Science Lab, can further enhance anonymity, but require a hard fork, so almost the entire Litecoin community needs to make a unanimous decision to avoid a split of the Litecoin blockchain.

Regarding the feasibility and implementation of this plan, Litecoin founder Charlie Lee clearly expressed his support for Litecoin confidential transactions, and Dr. Wang Xinxi has already started working on this two weeks ago. At present, the preliminary research has been completed, and the Litecoin development team will formulate a specific implementation plan as soon as possible.

Finally, Dr. Wang Xinxi also said that if you are interested in joining the Litecoin development team, you are welcome to contact them.

Finally, attached are the references provided by Dr. Wang Xinxi:
[1]https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/confidential-transactions-how-hiding-transaction-amounts-increases-bitcoin-privacy-1464892525
[2] https://people.xiph.org/~greg/confidential_values.txt
[3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1098.pdf
[4] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/yael/publications/2001-Leak_Secret.pdf