litecoin VS litecoin

You want technical? You've got it: https://github.com/ltc-mweb/litecoin/tree/0.21/doc/mweb

Great questions! No time for a thorough response right now, but I'll follow up on each point sometime over the next week. In the meantime, hopefully this can help: https://github.com/ltc-mweb/litecoin/blob/0.21/doc/mweb/stealth_addresses.md

Code Commits are still flying in... https://github.com/ltc-mweb/litecoin/commits/0.21

A fungability and privacy upgrade to Litecoin, which would potentially make it the worlds most widely accepted privacy coin, was just released on the testnet (https://github.com/ltc-mweb/litecoin/releases/tag/mwebtest) and is preparing for release and miner signaling on the mainnet. This upgrade was audited by the 3rd party auditing firm Quarkslab. See https://www.wenmweb.com, https://litecointalk.io/t/mweb-progress-update-thread/26678/282 (click Login then just click the X), https://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/qmgohm/mimblewimble_progress_update_thread_october/

Link: MWEB Testnet Release

The release process we inherited from bitcoin can be quite painful. It uses gitian to build repeatable and deterministic binaries from the source code. This means that multiple people can all build the code on different machines (and even different operating systems) and still get the same exact release binaries. We can then all compare the results and then sign the release, certifying that we all agree that the published release is safe & accurate.

For the code monkeys among you, the majority of the changes were in: scriptpubkeyman.cpp, mweb_wallet.cpp, and Keychain.cpp.

Open Source Litecoin is fully decentralized in the fact any one person could submit code into the network and as long as a majority of miners agree to that fork it will be implimented. This is similar to bitcoin.

Progress continues with the integration of Litecoin code changes into the v24 Bitcoin codebase. The month of May saw a major milestone with the resolution of all remaining functional tests for the pre-MWEB merge task. The code has been submitted for review here.

git clone https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin.git

"If upgrading to 0.21.2 after MWEB has activated, you must resync to download MWEB blocks." https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/releases

I tried following this tutorial: https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/blob/master/doc/build-osx.md

However, this serialization format seems to contradict with BIP 0144, which states: "if the witness is empty, the old serialization format must be used." also contradict the comments in the litecoin source code at https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/blob/master/src/primitives/transaction.h

In order to add MWEB support to PSBTs, I first had to merge in PSBTv2 (BIP-0370), which can be seen here. I then defined the MWEB fields we needed to add, and added them to the PSBT data structures along with serialization and deserialization here.

A pull request has also been submitted for downloading and verifying HogEx transactions, MWEB headers, and the UTXO leafset bitmap. This covers steps 2 and 3 of the light client sync process.