A new privacy paper surfaced in the "bitcoin wizards" chat channel Wednesday bearing a familiar name – "Tom Elvis Jedusor," the French version of Tom Riddle (better-known as Harry Potter's archenemy Lord Voldemort).
Strange as it sounds, this isn't the first time this happened. A little more than two years ago, a protocol improving two of blockchain's biggest problems, privacy and scalability, aptly titled "MimbleWimble," was released by a cryptographer going by the pseudonym. Even ever-fickle active bitcoin developers agreed it was a good proposal, one that would go on to spark a flurry of innovation and activity.
Blockchain projects Grin and Beam are now putting the ambitious mathematical ideas to the test, hoping to finish a working blockchain that puts MimbleWimble's ideas into practice for the first time soon.