TumbleBit and MimbleWimble, enhanced privacy and anonymity at scale by removing basic Bitcoin scripting. Increased complexity, less flexibility. This is part of a talk which took place on October 26th 2016 at the Blockchain Meetup in Zürich, Switzerland.
Transcript
[AUDIENCE] Recently, I read about a lot about Tumblebit and MimbleWimble. [In those two cases, the result is more privacy, because you make certain data less visible on-chain]. [ANDREAS] That is true. MimbleWimble delivers privacy and anonymity at a much better scale with Bitcoin.
It does so at the cost of computational complexity and flexibility. On a scale, if Bitcoin is [more inflexible], and Ethereum is much more flexible, MimbleWimble is in the opposite direction. All you can do is elliptic curve points. You can't even do basic Bitcoin scripting, so there is a trade-off.
It is just a trade-off on a different axis. I think the same applies to Tumblebit, but I am not sure. I would like to see.