Community Council Candidacy: Trinitron

Governance
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I am submitting this post as my candidacy for the grin community council:

I am just an enthusiastic grin user.

I discovered mimblewimble on reddit and was excited to see novel development on a plain and simple cryptocurrency coin concept, without a convoluted “utility” or “smart contracts”.

I watched Andrew Poelstra’s talk on youtube and he mentioned that someone was working on a standalone chain based on mimblewimble. Some time after that, I found the grin forum had been created.

I was excited for mimblewimble, but I was thrilled to discover that this creator designed grin with a constant block reward. This to me is grin’s ultimate innovation and single most important property.

My background is in IT but in systems administration not software development so I don’t have a lot of technical input to give to grin. I try to keep my nodes running well for the network.

As far as my stance on issues, if you have been around in recent years you will know, I am a grin conservative. I would have almost believed in the original intention of pure base layer development with all transaction building methods left up to volunteer community, but http sending was a poor solution and I was very glad when I found slatepacks had been added. I would point to the tradeogre slatepacks deposit and withdrawal functionality as the best integration grin has ever seen. I believe we should celebrate and build on slatepacks rather than developing transport mechanisms like tor, bbs, or nostr.

If there is one thing I frequently oppose from the community, it would be what I call cargo cult development, that is features that people are interested in not because they want to use them themselves but because they think they will attract others to grin. For example hardware wallets have been a long time major desire, with much interest expressed, and yet when it arrived I don’t think I saw a single comment ever from anybody who had actually tried to use it. I don’t mean to take any credit away from nicholasflamel and I applaud his development, but I encourage everyone else to reflect on whether they really want the things the have asked for, or if they are just trying to retrace bitcoin’s footsteps like a treasure map.

I believe that for many features that might seem like good candidates for community funding, real demand for it must come first and if there is actually a real demand we probably won’t need to fund them at all.

I welcome any questions about my disposition, opinions, history, or conduct.

The prospect of holding keys to the community fund does not excite me, so I would be happier to take a keyless role. If it comes to the point where it would be important and helpful to though, I will consider it.

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I totally agree. Nostr would be the transport mechanism for slatepacks.

I’m a slatepack maximalist :wink: and I don’t support bloating grin code with something like a single-purpose BBS. Transport agnostic :+1:

I also agree. I view hardware keys as something a more hardcore user would want, but Grin still lacks the very basic generic user. I also don’t wish to minimize the amazing work that has been done.

Bingo. I want to see Grin go where Bitcoin still has not gone themselves. Grin slatepacks can provide an experience that only Bitcoin can achieve through custodial Lightning products.

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I believe that some things should just exist even if currently they’re not being used and hardware wallets are one of such things. It’s about what kind of security options you give to current and new users, what they choose is their decision/problem. But those are exceptions, many tools get developed, as you’ve pointed out, by the community through time when they need them. However it’s important to note that linear emission delays the hype a lot, which means that if nothing is funded then years might go by when not much gets developed.

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I agree with your overall point, but I guess I am the one exception who will actually be using it once my model one arrives tomorrow, there will also be support for the model T coming soon.

Same, really wish we could find a way to apply our sysadmin skills to help grin. I may send you a DM for an idea I have and would like feedback on relating to this.

Your hesitancy I take as a good thing, it’s not a role to be taken lightly.

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Happy to see you step-up @Trinitron!
I do want to remind both you and @trab that the purpose of the Grin community fund is slightly different from that of the OC. The purpose is to within reason accommodate the wants and the needs of the community.

This means we are allowed to make experiments (e.g. Nostr) or even fund components that might not be directly used but as @vegycslol pointed out, to fund things to be ahead of the curve (HW wallets and CoinSwap) or allow more users to experiment (web-plugins, mimblewimble Python). A web-plugin would for example empower users to play around with web-shops, have fun, and help create an ecosystem even though that would be for the few user who adopted grin and do not care it has not been a profitable investment yet. We should only not spend disproportional amounts on them, think more of fun grands.

I do agree that at the core we should keep things as simple and modular as possible. So yes, we should embrace slate-packs and not bloat the core components with features that only contribute little. We should however balance that conservative and minimalist attitude with an open mind ready to innovate, experiment while listening to the communities wants and needs IMO.

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Isn’t running and maintaining nodes a much needed skill? That seems very helpful to me!

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For sure it is and I’ll continue to run mine and fire up a few more once I have my lab back up and running. The idea I’m cooking up will relate to nodes and increasing the overall number without centralizing them at the same time.

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Oh another footnote to add: I am in UTC-7/8 time zone and can only attend meetings from 5-7am or 10am-2pm my time. This might conflict with a lot of existing meeting times and would require accommodation.

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So that would be between 12:00 am UTC 14:00 UTC and or 5-9 AM UTC. At least for me that would be possible. Also, you can always give your input before meetings on a specific topic. That is what most of us do when we cannot attend a meeting but still want to voice our opinion on a topic. Anyway, first get elected :wink:

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Yup, just warning everyone so you can not elect me for this reason if it seems to onerous.

I mean UTC minus 8 so I think it’s actually 12-2pm/5-9pm UTC.