Hi! I’m a software developer (and highly skilled at it), but I was laid off and I’ve been wondering if there are people that need one and willing to pay with GRIN. I’m also working on a project about building a survival network that provides an end-of-the-world lifestyle for those that help in making it happen. It’s insurance as the backers will have a place to flee to if needed.
On another note, does anybody knows where I could exchange GRIN to other more notable cryptocurrency? It seems that very few exchanges support it.
Hi! There are a number of things being worked on in Grin from GUI work to really technical stuff, with help always needed. There is also the opportunity to be creative and if your strengths match a need, you could create a proposal and seek out funding.
As for exchanges, there aren’t many options I’m afraid. Perhaps you could work on building one!
Although I’m not afraid neither of GUI work or “really technical stuff” (I know abstract algebra and number theory), but all of the code base of Grin is in either C++ or Rust, languages that are not easy to get started with nor easy to maintain. I’m a Linux user used to building projects from source (CMake, autotools), so I’m aware of the hassle that it would be to add a small change to the existing code base. For the minimal implementation of the Mimblewimble protocol using Rust, there is a space of months between commits and for the Grin++ client written in C++, there is a space of year between commits. The choice of language likely plays a role in this extremely slow pace. It’s hard to convince “party A” to pay now for the work of “party B” if the delivery only happens a year later.
I’m used a daily pace: daily writing unit tests, daily writing simple GUIs to demonstrate some functionality. Nowadays, I always stick to JavaScript (and maybe throw some WASM) simply because it’s proper enough to get things done and it’s easier to make changes if needed (unlike Rust and C++). This is particularly useful for experimental projects. It’s easier to build a version that can be demonstrated to third-parties through a web browser. All JavaScript engines nowadays support WASM and the numerous useful built-in libraries (big integers, sockets).
Will I be rewarded, even though it takes that long to provide code to look at? Will I have to wait for payment if no code has been released yet? The long wait time makes it harder to do business, both for “party A” or “party B”.
Yep, that makes it a bit harder to start contributing, making changes requires you to basically understand the whole thing. If you just want to play or get a feeling for Grin, you can also use the work in progress grin Python library: https://pypi.org/project/mimblewimble/
Find below a list of grin relate repositories, that might give you inspiration. On the bottom part there is a lot of information for developers:
Regarding the work reward cycle, that is always a bit of challenging. When someone has a standing reputation as contributor, there is no issue paying upfront, per 3 months etc. but then first you have to prove yourself. If there is anything in particular you would like to work on or where you think you can add value, let us know.
I’m reading about them at the moment. I finally found an exchange that supports GRIN (TradeOgre) and they requested that from me and I have no idea what that is.
Grin requires all transactions to be interactive. There’s good reason for this, but there’s a small hit to the UX because of it. Obviously you won’t be online at the same time as the other person in all cases (in some cases you will though!).
So Slatepacks are a way to keep the interactive / online functionality of the transaction while also allowing the process to be asynchronous (don’t have to be online at the same time as the other person).
What it looks like in practice is you are sending each other long strings of jumbled characters back and forth. You’re copying and pasting these strings into your wallet of choice.
I’m aware of that to some extent, and this is because Mimblewimble requires both sender and receiver to sign the transaction, correct? I have not fully read the Mathematics of it yet, but there is no way around this because of the algebra behind it, correct?
Right. I sort of think of this as being like Bitcoin’s Lightning network. Interactivity has better privacy and safety.
In my opinion, it’s best to compare Grin to Lightning rather than to compare it to the base Bitcoin network.
Lightning also has a way to do “offline” transactions with “vouchers”. This would be similar to slatepacks.
There’s some ideas about how to make slatepacks easier to use. One idea that some of us have is to just have a messenger built into the app so that slatepacks can be sent back and forth, stored on the messaging service. And it becomes like a venmo type experience.
Thanks everyone for the replies. If I were to work on some project, who should I negotiate with? If there is a need for me to prove myself, I could translate this ongoing implementation of the mimblewimble protocol from Python to JavaScript as a demonstration of my skills (the code doesn’t look that long, maybe one month should be enough). Translations are considerably less work than something novel, as there are no costs associated with exploration and trying new things.