Litecoin’s creator announced via Twitter that they are planning to add Confidential Transactions (CT) into a future release of full node implementation later this year. Charlie Lee states that the idea to add CT, which could softforked in, is to make the cryptocurrency more fungible. He adds that they are also exploring doing bulletproof MimbleWimble with extension blocks.

Fungibility is the only property of sound money that is missing from Bitcoin & Litecoin. Now that the scaling debate is behind us, the next battleground will be on fungibility and privacy.

I am now focused on making Litecoin more fungible by adding Confidential Transactions. ?

— Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) January 28, 2019

Though there’re still questions on his claim about the scaling debate. Lee admits that the scalability problem of Bitcoin may not have been fully solved, the introduction of SegWit and layer 2 solutions like the Lightning Network have brought about some progress. Also, the main parties involved in the scaling debate have splitted into their own coins.

Discussions about adding the feature come at a time when the need for the younger generation – who have gotten used to social media platforms like Facebook where the posting of personal content is common – to learn the importance of privacy is growing. The addition of this feature by Litecoin could help Bitcoin. By taking the lead on the controversial technology, Litecoin’s success with it may eventually help CT make its way into Bitcoin.

About CT
While it has been argued not to offer complete privacy or confidentiality, CT ensures that parties do not have insights into how much the other owns when spending coins.It will only conceal the amount of transactions and not the sender and receiver details. Nonetheless, this could be valuable for individual security as well as business operations. On whether the CT feature will be made mandatory on Litecoin network as it is the case with Monero or optional (e.g. ZCash), Lee notes that it would be optional at the initial stage while consensus is sought for its being mandatory later as such is “much stronger privacy and fungibility.”

What's your view on the plan to add Confidential Transactions into Litecoin?

— Litecoin.com (@LitecoinDotCom) January 28, 2019

There’re concerns raised about the proposed strategic move since governments generally have not really accepted cryptocurrencies. The argument is that making them somewhat untraceable could compel governments to try to stop private crypto-related transactions – not by stopping privacy-based coins like Monero which currently offer such features but – by criminalizing their ownership as it is the case of Monero banned in Japan. The CT in Litecoin will probably use code from Elements project and Lee maintains he is throwing the discussion to open to figure out if there’s a consensus on it and “so far, people seem to agree.”

Litecoin of late
A lot seem to have been going on for Litecoin recently in ways that prop its credibility. EasyDNS stopped accepting Bitcoin Cash for its fork into Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin ABC but replaced it with Litecoin. The development now makes EasyDNS the first and only ICANN accredited registrar in the world to accept Litecoin. Also, PayWithMoon has now made it possible to buy anything on top global marketplace, Amazon, using Litecoin.

?Great NEWS ? now you can use @paywithmoon to buy anything on @amazon with #Litecoin! You connect with your @coinbase account and ??Boom you can now #PayWithLitecoin ? #IgniteTheFireLTC @SatoshiLite @LTCFoundation @DaddyCool1991 @cryptolili @NetworksManager @bensemchee pic.twitter.com/036W5KtoI2

— johnkimofficial.com ⚡️Chief LTC Evangelist (@johnkim77) February 1, 2019