First and foremost, I’d like to thank @Paouky for being an awesome community member and all the things he has done (especially but not limited to making the docs prettier and better). Secondly, @Mokhtar and @Cobragrin are bad asses and they’ll be getting my vote. There will be no hard feelings for choosing them, in fact I recommend it despite the fact that I’d be honored if chosen.
I first got interested in cryptocurrencies in 2014. Later, I heard about grin around 6 months before launch via bitcoin maxis and I started looking into the project. I very much value the concept of private, secure, scalable, permissionless, decentralized, and censorship-resistant currency. While we still might not have the perfect technology to foster the crypto adoption we are all hoping for, I think mimblewimble and grin is the best technology today and would love nothing more than to help try to promote grin and it’s future. For the first time in my life I started mining a cryptocurrency the day Grin launched and I never looked back. I’ve been mining ever since on my hobby, single GPU, setup. When iPollo announced the G1 Mini I played a role in trying to get as many into the grin communities hands as possible (big thanks to many others namely Gary, MCMike and others).
My Views on Moving Forward
I think it would be really great if we could have more leaders and more voices supporting the Free and Open Source Software in the grin ecosystem. Another obvious form of support would be funding. But I find it unfortunate that multiple open sourced pools have failed to be supported by the community, I hope we can gather greater support for grinmint now (and open source the code whenever possible).
The three most critical components for funding decisions are the following:
- is it important/useful/critical
- is the funded entity capable of delivering
- is the funding requirement sustainable (a one time thing or requires recurrent funding).
I would like to fund more research into mimblewimble and grin, even thought I acknowledge that some of the research might not materialize into anything usable for the community. We should also focus on funding our wish list, developing an ecosystem around grin (like payment processors) and both attracting new talent and retaining the talent we have (both Davids, Blade Doyle, Hendi, maybe get McDallas back as well as others).
While there may be some that dont like me very much, I hope most can appreciate my passion, loyalty, willingness to engage in discourse and engage newcomers to the community. I am also prevalent in many crypto communities and do my best to promote grin and learn more things that I bring to the conversations I have with the grin community.
I am excited about grin’s future and will be apart of it in any capacity that I am capable of. But if you haven’t noticed I have been much busier recently and thus less engaged. I know I can sign funding txs, vote on decisions, and keep up with the conversations (I still read everything), but my excess free time is more limited now.