Chronesthesia - Backcasting and Premortem

Governance
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This is an attempt at an excercise in goal-setting using mental time travel.

The idea is to imagine what we want grin to ideally look like in 5+ years and work backwards from those goals. Another aspect (related to risk management) is pre-mortems, where we imagine the worst case has already ocurred and work backwards from that scenario to try and prevent it ahead of time.

The things off the top of my mind that would be key ingredients for success in 5 years would be:

  1. Fully featured mobile node/wallets using ultra light protocols so that anyone can fully participate in the grin network from their phones.
  2. Mobile wallets integrated with NFC (like applepay) or smartcards (like chip credit cards), so that grin could be used easily to buy things out-and-about. Whether a phone or some piece of computer hardware would be required to program smartcards I can’t imagine, but I can picture an airgapped computer with an inxepensive cheap reader attached used to send slate files to a card or something (not sure how useful this would be, and may require all types of permanent address hacks, but the gist of it is I want a way to easily pay with grin with just my phone or a card.
  3. Cheap/open source point-of-sale hardware, likely able to run as a full node, that could be donated or dropped off at stores to quickly integrate grin into the shopping experience in a brick-and-mortar marketplace.

The list goes on, but just to get the ball rolling I’m starting with these because to replace cash grin has to be as easy and prevalent as credit cards, and I think this list presents some of the building blocks of this.
@lehnberg what do you think of this thought experiment.

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2 and 3 sound unrealistic to me

Try, a user friendly mulitcoin lightening network exists and sending things with grin managed to get everything working well enough to be part of that that in a userfriendly way. With other advancements in privacy on grin this fact of life means double digits of the volume of the super LN is anonymous.

Grin survived the shitcoin purge as one of the single digit of coins considered real by the market, when the market recovered got lots of dev, user base and investment.

Cheap/open source point-of-sale hardware, likely able to run as a full node, that could be donated or dropped off at stores to quickly integrate grin into the shopping experience in a brick-and-mortar marketplace.

A phone wallet with qr code scaning and it being an option for farmers markets is a touch more on the table

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I think #1 needs to have a built-in supereasy FIAT gateway.

Average users should never have to signup to an exchange nor fiddle with other cryptos and addresses.

2 Likes
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Agree re: #3. Folks already have hardware i.e. mobile phones and tablets etc. These are the devices that will have to be used to conduct transactions. I don’t think there is a hope in hell of getting stores, bars, restaurants to adopt and install new hardware en masse just to take one particular form of payment that is untested and in its infancy.

@ 0xb100d I do like the idea of backcasting and premortems - useful thought-experiments that could help to suggest ideas for roadmap.

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