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Thanks for sharing this, I haven't heard of MimbleWimble before but indeed it looks interesting. Here's the original whitepaper if anyone is interested: https://github.com/mimblewimble/docs/wiki/MimbleWimble-Origi... I wasn't there during the dot-com era, but from what I read it was the same situation: lots of scammers and cool kids raising millions from investors driven by FOMO (fear of missing out), and lots of money ending up in the wrong hands.

Only storing the merkle tree is useful for SPV nodes. The actual full nodes need to store the full chain to verify blocks (or else you could double spend). In mimblewibmle, the full nodes has visibility over interactive transactions only while joined of the network. The final artifact is a combined tx that spans the whole block -- ie: you throw away lots of tx detail and use the kernel for validation. The grin wiki explains the basis of MW protocol: https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin/blob/master/doc/intro.m... The original whitepaper is : https://github.com/mimblewimble/docs/wiki/MimbleWimble-Origi... Two implementations of this (slightly different) today are: https://grin-tech.org/ and https://www.beam.mw/

The biggest privacy issue with grin is it doesn't hide the transaction graph. See their own write up[0] which offers a very good and nuanced privacy discussion. This means, for example, you can be tracked by colluding vendors. Or can be identified when trying to accept payments anonymously. I don't think blinding factors are as much of an issue. Zcash setup doesn't matter for privacy. The larger issue is as you said, adoption of private transactions. [0]https://github.com/mimblewimble/docs/wiki/Grin-Privacy-Prime...

It looks like you'll have to transfer a few files back and forth manually (sneakernet style). Alternatively it looks like you can expose your wallet over HTTP and others can send tokens to your API endpoint. https://github.com/mimblewimble/docs/wiki/How-to-use-grin#se...