MWEB Progress Update Thread

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Interesting idea.

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Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the MW testnet going to launch at end September? Are we waiting for the last second? Just asking, no hard feelings.

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Of course we are! :laughing:

It’s going to launch this evening EST time. For developers and other technical folks who want to participate in initial testing, please join the telegram group at Telegram: Contact @MWEB_testnet and please wait patiently for instructions.

For non-technical users, it may be a bit difficult to get involved now, but I’m working on making it easier for everyone to test. This could take several days though.

Thanks everyone for your patience. I will have a detailed update about the launch late tonight.

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Thank you for the fast reply and of course, all your hard work! Great to be on track. ETH can learn from this.

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September Progress:

Testnet is here!!! :rocket: :partying_face: :muscle:

So far, there are only a few nodes connected and mining, and there haven’t been enough blocks to activate mimblewimble yet (we’re using BIP9-style activation[1]). As more peers connect and start to mine, I’m hoping we can get the chain moving fast enough to activate in a day or so, but time will tell.

I’m still roughing in very minimal cli wallet support, but hopefully we’ll have a simple way to create mimblewimble transactions by the time it activates. For technical users who aren’t afraid of CLIs, and are willing to build the code themselves, I encourage you to join in on the fun by going to Telegram: Contact @MWEB_Testnet.

The new home for the code is at LTC MWEB · GitHub. For those of you unaware, MWEB is now the new official acronym for “Mimblewimble Extension Block.” It’s so super official, that we’ve got an awesome logo and everything! Check it out: https://twitter.com/SatoshiLite/status/1311376460158955521.

Going Forward:

Now that the MWEB testnet is running, I’m going to focus on ways to make it easy for non-technical litecoin users to start testing it out as well. This means improving the automated builds, better documentation, and starting to build out wallet support.

Right now, there are a number of areas in the code that are fragile or lack the necessary validation around edge cases, so I’ll also be taking some time this month to harden the code, and start validating any remaining consensus rules we missed. Once I’m confident everything is working as designed, I’ll start looking for ways to break the testnet, to make sure we find and resolve any security or stability weaknesses.

Next month, I’ll share a detailed plan of all of the remaining work necessary to get MWEB merged to the main repo, so that miners and node operators can start signaling for activation sometime in 2021! :smile:

[1] BIP 0009 - Bitcoin Wiki

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Awesome thanks for the update. If I can help in anyway I would be willing to volunteer to help test MWEB. Just DM me or let me know what I can do and I will do it David.

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Thank you for the hard work. Cant wait for this to go live.

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Thanks @QPatriot! Are you a C++ or python developer by any chance?

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Hey @David, definitely a C++ Developer but I can work with you in anyway you need. I really want Litecoin to continue to be one of the Top Cryptos out there so anything I can help with to make this happen you can let me know and I will do it to the best of my ability.

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Awesome to hear! I’ll get issues added to the repo sometime this weekend for the remaining work. GitHub - ltc-mweb/libmw

In the meantime, if you have telegram, come to Telegram: Contact @MWEB_testnet and I can help point you towards some tasks.

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hi david, sorry for my noob question, but how long does it take before implementation into litecoin ? 1 month, 1 year,… ?

More than 1 month and hopefully less than 1 year :laughing:

Sometime in 2021 is the only timeline I can really give you. There are just too many factors, many of which are outside of my control (audits, code reviews, miner signaling & activation, etc)

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:partying_face:

October Progress:

The testnet has been running for a month now and has highlighted the areas where more work is needed. Several bugs were found as a result, which means the early testnet launch was highly valuable.

After sorting out the most critical bugs (thanks to the help of a couple of awesome contributors[1]), I switched to adding full wallet support. I was able to finish this up a few days ago[2], and I’m planning to roll those changes out to all the testers tomorrow evening.

I’ve also changed how MW blocks are built[3] to avoid a lot of downfalls in the existing approach.


Remaining Work:

November '20 - Wallet testing and start implementing non-interactive transactions. Most of this month will be about fixing testnet issues and trying to improve the one-sided txs proposal[4].

December '20 - Finish coding one-sided txs. Include MWEB wallet functionality into the GUI.

January '21 - Launch MWEB testnet 2 with one-sided tx support and include non-technical users. Open a pull request to merge in the code to the main repo!

As always, this is subject to change (blame it on my ADHD). But by the current looks of things, we should be done coding sometime in January.


P.S. I just want to say a huge thank you to the many people who have helped out with the testnet in various ways!

[1] Contributors to ltc-mweb/libmw · GitHub
[2] Wallet support by DavidBurkett · Pull Request #20 · ltc-mweb/libmw · GitHub
[3] Using updated wallet & miner APIs by DavidBurkett · Pull Request #5 · ltc-mweb/litecoin · GitHub
[4] One-sided MW transactions. by DavidBurkett · Pull Request #13 · litecoin-project/lips · GitHub

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David How is your physical condition recently?

why you ask that ?

David had COVID-19.

I’m doing well now, thanks for asking. I guess that means I’m immune for 4-6 months, so I can go back to partying like it’s 2019 :slightly_smiling_face:

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That’s the spirit😃!

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