Does Mimblewimble have any relevance to new pruning ideas for Monero?

Question

This Mimblewimble paper was introduced last month by Tom Elvis Jedusor.

It appears that the system will not work with Bitcoin (on chain)

The first thing we need to do is remove Bitcoin Script. This is sad, but it is too powerful so it is impossible to merge transactions using general scripts.

The system would provide inferior privacy to RingCT because RingCT provides untraceability that CoinJoin and CT cannot. Are there any pruning concepts from Mimblewimble that could benefit Monero? If so how would those potential savings in compare to the type of database pruning already in production with Aeon?

Answer 1

The paper is interesting and Monero was mentioned at one point:

OWAS had the good idea to combine the transactions in blocks. Imagine that we can combine across blocks (perhaps with some glue data) so that when the outputs are created and destroyed, it is the same as if they never existed. Then, to validate the entire chain, users only need to know when money is entered into the system (new money in each block as in Bitcoin or Monero or peg-ins for sidechains [6]) and final unspent outputs, the rest can be removed and forgotten.

However, the paper does not appear particularly useful to Monero. It says nothing about Monero key images (which prevent double spending and cannot be pruned). Monero is much different than Bitcoin in that it is much harder to determine which outputs (included in a ring signature) are spent or not. This distinction relates directly to what can and cannot be easily pruned.