Crypto Academy / S4W2 - Homework Summary [Advanced Level] - Mimblewimble Protocol

It's my pleasure to be writing at this time of the day. I will be using this piece of article to give a summary of how things went in the Season 4 Week 2 of the Crypto Academy which would include observations and statistics of participation.

In the just concluded Crypto Academy week, I discussed the Mimblewimble Protocol with the students, which is a blockchain protocol that is aimed to improve on the existing blockchain. The Mimblewimble protocol comes with innovations that allow anonymity of transactions and improved scalability.

With this protocol, two users (sender and receiver) can agree to transact by exchanging verifying information such that they would make transactions with improved privacy, keeping it completely anonymous to the outsiders. In addition, the block size of the Mimblewimble protocol is smaller as compared to other blockchain and this has a great effect on its scalability.

I thoroughly inspected the homework submitted to me and there are a few things I noticed. Many users missed out on important features of the Mimblewimble protocol and a large number of participants were able to produce the correct pros and cons of the blockchain protocol in question, Mimblewimble protocol. Let's explore a few things below.

The students understood that in the transaction, the sender and the receiver are required to exchange verifying information before they can proceed. In many entries, it was stated just the way I put it in the last sentence but what is it that was exchanged? That's the Blinding factor, a random value chosen by a sender and the same value selected by the receiver to make him/her a valid receiver of the funds involved.

Likewise, the students understood that redundant transaction information is eliminated but many couldn't say how that is possible. The simple answer to that is the Cut-through feature, this is the feature of the Mimblewimble protocol that is responsible for removing redundant transaction information by aggregating the inputs and outputs, to have a single input-output pair thereby leading to smaller block size.

In this section of the task, many users stated how to implement Confidential transactions, Cut-through feature and so on, on the Bitcoin network. We spoke about the Lightning Network which is the second layer on the Bitcoin network which is aimed at improving scalability. In the same way, users should have put it simply, Mimblewimble protocol can be utilized as a Sidechain solution to enable anonymity of transactions and improve scalability, then, they can decide to state how it would be utilized with some of the features mentioned earlier. Users missed out on the keyword/another word with similar meaning, Sidechain solution.

In this section, we would look at how things went in the homework task for week 2 as far as Mimblewimble protocol is concerned. A total of 86 homework was received and visited timely, below is the performance breakdown of the entries:

Excellent represents grades within 9 - 10, Very Good for grades within 8 - 8.9, Good for grades within 6 - 7.9, Average for grades within 5 - 5.9, Below Average for grades below 5, Plagiarized are the contents that are found to have been copied from another source without proper reference and Invalid are incomplete articles/Users Powering down/Insufficient SP for the Advanced level. Let's see the distribution on the charts below.

Students' performance is quite okay for the week but I'd like to encourage students not to limit themselves to the few things discussed in the lecture, they should endeavor to spread their tentacles to come out with outstanding content. Students should pay attention to the requirements of the Academy, and stay away from plagiarism. Similarly, many users have a lot of grammatical errors and I'd like to suggest that users should proofread their content before submission and also make use of Grammarly to take care of likely grammatical errors. Thank you.