I recently began diving into the Mimble Wimble protocol. I found the white paper and general work around it to be amazing. It brings me to question the existence of utxos and addresses in Bitcoin. Coins like monero and mimble wimble derivatives function today with no on-chain addresses, and I am curious as to why addresses exist on the bitcoin blockchain. My understanding is that you can get rid of addresses and have people sign utxo's directly with ECC. It seems that addresses sorta function like accounts in eth and utxos's function for transactions in mimble wimble. Bitcoin seems to have both utxos and addresses and has some of the downsides of both approaches. Addresses in bitcoin lead to address reuse which is bad for privacy. Address reuse is prevalent today also. I thought all last night about the issue and I could not come up with a fundamental downside to Bitcoin ditching addresses and just going utxo only. I also thought about bitcoin going the opposite direction and just using addresses as accounts and getting rid of utxo's, sorta like eth. I know bitcoin would unlikely adopt these things due to coordination issues. I would love to learn more about these technical questions. Any links to further readings or thoughts on the issue would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much for your time!
A Bitcoin address is a unique string of letters and numbers that is used to send and receive Bitcoin. It serves as a digital ID for an individual's Bitcoin wallet, similar to a bank account number for a bank account. The main purpose of a Bitcoin address is to provide a destination for a Bitcoin transaction, so that the person sending the Bitcoin knows where to send it. It also allows the person receiving the Bitcoin to prove that they are the rightful owner of the address and therefore able to access and spend the Bitcoin.