Beam and Grin are two MW projects friendly to each other from what I understand with the Beam team having helped with Grin development in the past. Grin resembles Bitcoin as it is community owned and driven. Beam on the other hand is a private company though this might be changing with its transition to BeamX with DAO governance.
What does the future look like, can the two coexist, or will one eclipse the other? If for example Beam becomes the preferred privacy coin/L1 with EVM and DeFi capabilities, what value can Grin add?
I like to think Beam will be the new Ethereum and Grin the new Bitcoin but I’m a hopeless romantic.
This is just my own opinion, but surely both Grin and Beam have their merits as project.
I see Grin as the purest, most minimal and elegant mimblewimble implementation. Conservative in its attitude since what is good should not be changed. Like Bitcoin in that sence. Also, it’s linear emission makes Grin great as store of value and as digital cash for the decades to come. This is for me a major reason why I favor Grin over Beam, it’s fair emission.
Beam on the other hand allows for more experimentation and has a greater focus on utility and on supporting business use cases. So yes, a bit like Ethereum in that sense.
In any case, both projects are no money grabs, have very cool cryptography and have a good “raison d’être”, (reason to exist).
I wouldn’t put it that way. Nobody’s going to cry foul at someone reusing open source software but I think the attitude towards Beam is more like contemptuous. Grin was founded on getting away from these kinds of privatized projects.
@Trinitron I do not think that is correct. They are just two different paths that are being tried. There is no contempt nor even competition IMO. Beam people have contributed both financially and in code to Grin as a project and as I can see it aim for mutual benefit and the befit of the crypto space overall as do most of us here in Grin. Not without reasons Beam is listed among “friends of Grin”: https://grin.mw/friends.html
Mutualism, respect, constructive feedback and sharing of Open Source code between projects is healthy. We can all respect the differences between projects and simply back those projects we personally like or believe worth investing our energy and time in.
its ridiculous to have a company behind a crypto coin. This makes the company effectively a wildcat bank, a concept that failed for obvious reasons.
My advice: Stay away from it. Put your money into Grin, so i can sell with a profit.
Beam is also expecting eventual ASIC mining on their final PoW BeamHashIII [1], so not that different from Grin.
In this thread [2] on the Beam forum, no-one from team Beam contradicted my suggestion that the supply cap might be lifted in the future when low mining subsidies put security of the chain into question.
Blockstream is behind Bitcoin. There is still a chance if some corporation will come to Grin eventually and will bring people here and will fund them. Nobody can not stop this.
Except Grin has ASICs now, major part are G1 and GPUs are still not competitive, so some group is mining major part of coins, iPollo also stopped selling them: https://ipollo.com/products/ipollo-g1
@ardocrat
Compared to other projects I think Grin and Ipollo have done an amazing job at enabling regular users to being able to ASIC mine Grin using G1 Mini’s. I think this is something the project can be proud of since being fair is not only achieved through 1) fair emission of 1 grin/second, but as well through 2) enabling regular users to mine Grin and 3) by using a proof of work algorithm that makes large part of the costs the hardware and not the electricity.
This is much more fair than for example Bitcoin mining where a) an average user can absolutely not afford to buy a miner and 2) where electricity is the major costs for miners.
There will always be groups with access to cheap electricity who can mine cheaper, but these differences are much smaller than in other projects.
We have GPUs for this, they are selling at every shop, except G1 mini, it was noticed at last price rise, Grin’s hashrate remained unchanged, clear signal there is no GPU miners.
More fair than Bitcoin, not as BEAM as example
Problem is G1, they are restricted for group of people, not selling anymore, so if price will keep stay low to make GPU mining unprofitable and uncompetitive, this group will keep mining major part of coins, what is not fair from my POV.
Initially I was like you for GPU mining. However, I soon realized ASIC mining is way better for security. The only caveat I had was that I feared regular users would not have access to ASICs, luckily some people put in a lot of effort to realize my and other people’s dream of ASIC mining at home.
GPU mining opens a huge attack vector, any small project can be easily reorged by renting GPU power. The same cannot be said for ASIC’s that run algorithms that are tied to a few projects that use them like Grin’s Cuckoo Cycle, C32. In my opinion it should be avoided that we ever go back to GPU mining, except perhaps some ridiculously expensive top end GPU’s that can naturally compete for Grin mining based on their electricity fee. That is safe enough since those GPU’s are not commonly available and cannot compete in price compared to buying G1 and G1 Mini’s.
Security is questionable, cause large miner can still has a chance for attack, basic reorg protection is needed, like Beam has a rolling checkpoint mechanism that prevents automatic reorg any deeper than 60 blocks. Another problem with ASICs is known way before:
Perspective thing for Cuckoo algo is possibility to launch it effectively on GPUs with big amount of memory for AI: NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPU
Question is about price as usually, but if AI and Grin can co-exist it can be win-win situation.
I also don’t see licensing for gpus, but everything else seems the same to me. 99% of people who mine do it to earn more money. So if ASICS don’t exist, then anyone would be able to mine grin with his gpu. I expect that vast majority would go to services like nicehash and lend their gpu power to them which would make 51% attacks a lot easier or not?
this group will keep mining major part of coins, what is not fair from my POV.
With a few weeks of patience, you can buy millions of Grin on exchanges for near the all time lowest price. Plus we’re not even at 5% of the soft supply. It doesn’t get much fairer than that…
Another difference: Grin is not easily confused with other coins, while Beam has to contend with Beam-2, causing some circulating supply mishaps on f2pool [1]…
@bruges ASICs are not low end. True though that G1 is slightly more efficient than G1Mini, meaning large miners do have a slightly better deal.
What is the minimum price for a competitive Bitcoin miner? Quite sure. It’s more than the cost of a 200$ G1 Mini. The electricity point I made holds, there is more unequal access to cheap electricity than to mining hardware. Hence Grin is more fair in mining than Bitcoin is right now. To relitivate, fair mining is not that important since anyone can buy both Grin or BTC at a fair price from the market. But for the sake of decentralization it is still something to appreciate IMO that anyone can easily mine Grin without huge equipment or electricity costs.
