Did the grin project fail?

#1

More than 20 days have passed since the last hard fork, and most exchanges still do not support slatepacks trading. What will happen to the grin dug up by miners during this period? How should mining machinery manufacturers deal with it? The community didn’t give any formal explanation to users. Well, I feel that grin may have really failed!

If the exchange does not support slatepacks because of communication, why not solve the support problem of the exchange before upgrading the hard fork? Now that the hard fork has been completed, the exchange does not support it. Is this to put grin at risk?

This blockchain browser https://grin.blockscan.com/ Up to now, no one has informed them that the block will stay at 1048319 forever. Is that funny?

#2

I used their contact form on the page to tell them, but apparently they didn’t update yet. Not sure if they have not seen it or they’re just not interested.

2 Likes
#3

as long as there is an exchange that works well with Grin, the problem is not with Grin, but with the direction in which the crypto world has taken it.

2 Likes
#4

You can also see this block explorer stuck at block 1048319 as well. But this does not indicate a critical problem. You can still use two working block explorers:

:information_source: grinexplorer.net

:information_source: grinscan.net

I do not think that two block explorers stopped due to human inattention is such a significant factor that it speaks about the wilting of Grin. And I don’t understand why you are so fixated on this.

#5

A failed coin tends not to stay in the top 20 (by daily issuance) PoW coins

https://www.f2pool.com/coins

6 Likes
#6

Did the grin project fail?

That’s a tricky question, because I believe the answer is “yes” and “no”.

Did it fail in terms of tech? No. It is unique, minimalistic and does what it was supposed to do. So it is a success here.

Did it fail in terms of adoption? I believe yes. It would not be the first time in history (not only in crypto history, but generally tech) when superior, unique technology never reaches adoption it deserves (most common example are video standards, both in analogue and digital era). It just never cought on and the longer since launche the slimmer chance it will reach adoption. Why is that? One might guess. Maybe it is general dev/team attitude, who seemed very nonchalant in communication with third parties like exchanges or pools (even shittiest shitcoin reaches exchanges to communicate changes and makes sure they are implemented properly). Also whenever huge money is involved the spirit of independence fades - it all became about paying people for working on Grin and only few people worked for free and in real grassroot way. Don’t get me wrong, all the funds were spent wisely so far, but it created huge split in the community, you can’t have true grassroot project with tons of money being paid to the selected few. Bounty like mechanism implemented since launch would have been much better but this was already discussed in numerous places, maybe things will get better in this department, but damage has been done already. Also, competitors like Beam (or even scammy MimbleWimbleCoin) are just way more proactive. Not to even mention other privacy-oriented coins. Grin is just one missed opportunity after the other, while people are busy splitting huge money or arguing about various stuff each new opportunity of partnership and gaining traction is missed. Biggest example recently: ThorChain (one of the hottest projects in crypto now) was looking for anonymity solution using another coin, and of course Monero will probably win (or Beam as more proactive) and Grin did nothing to take that opportunity - devs because that’s not what they are getting paid for (ifyou want to run it company style, just hire someone responsible for partnerships whyile you are coding), community didn’t because there is almost no community at this point.

One thing that looks good is the distribution. It is one of the most fair distributions in crypto history. This is an edge that can be easily copied by other projects but you just can’t do this instantly.

Also something is happening to all those mined coins. They are not being sold, at least not on an open market. Maybe some OTC buys are happening and some whales are accumulating, waiting for the correct moment to make a move, that would result in both adoption and price appreciation? But relying on some random whale that is in this for profit only to bring your project adoption is wrong.

Grin succeeded in tech department but it failed in adoption and community building. But this can be fixed.

3 Likes
#7

Grin will always be mineable. And that means he will always live.

When Ethereum will (likely) switch to PoS, what should huge crowds of miners do? I’m talking about Ethereum because it is mined by a really impressive number of people.

The same goes for other limited supply coins that can be mined through mining. So I think mining and the PoW model are a sticking point for all of Grin’s critics.

As for the rest of what you said, I consider this to be nothing more than speculation. And I advise you not to go into arguments about money or funds… Why do you need it? This has been enough here lately.

It is very easy to criticize. But we need to support the core team and not count the money that doesn’t belong to us. Ultimately, if we assume that the money may be spent for other purposes, then it will be completely on their conscience.

1 Like
#8

Afaik exchanges were notified, vast majority of coins which get listed pay a huge fee for that + i believe that many exchanges require a coin to have a CEO-like person for a project which doesn’t exist in grin.

There are 2 scenarios: in the first one i have enough money to live a happy life so i never take any money from grin. In the second one, i have a huge mortgage and would take it. I think it’s fair to pay people who are devoting their time to improve grin (code, marketing, research etc). Money is being paid to those who deliver good stuff and asked for it. Whoever is delivering good stuff for free can always ask for money. So don’t blame the “paid contributers” because some contributers don’t ask for payment, you need to respect both and applaud them for improving the project

3 Likes
#9

It’s the opposite. The longer grin survives (e.g. stays in the top 20 PoW coins https://www.f2pool.com/coins), the better it will get. Inflation rate lowers over time. Additional functionality gets added over time. Privacy leaks will be reduced over time. Increased ASIC mining improves security over time. The lack of halvings maintains long term security. The advantages of a slowly growing chain increase over time.

So I see adoption increasing over time.

12 Likes
#10

Might be a betwen fail and success like blackberry… or can be facebook after myspace)

#11

What I think is that we’re victims of our own hype, some kind of yellow fever. Picture this… imagine having Grin’s contributors and devs all of them inside a bus that is about to crash with a huge tree, and instead of taking the wheel and avoid the tree, Grin’s contributors and devs spend the time and effort debating things like: how much time it will take before crashing, how little (or big) the tree is… I can imagine some others even discussing if the tree is actually there.

Every time that the Exchange’s topic is mentioned we always say the same: “they were notified”… but when are we going to ask ourselves if we did enough efforts? that repeated answer sounds like we did not, it sounds like we do not care about that, meanwhile the Community is begging for this to happen… why?

The only good thing I see here is that Grin has a very loyal community, but we’re failing them big. We need a better mindset: let’s make things happen.

When are we going to take the wheel? and then talk about the physics of the imaginary crash that didn’t happen because we focused our energies on the most important thing: avoiding the crash.

5 Likes
#12

I think people are not familiar with the workings of exchanges and then we end up blaming exchanges/devs/community. There’s one site that I can’t find right now that shows the uptime of exchanges. It’s not good. They have huge problems because the volume jumped and frankly, they’d be incredibly stupid to put resources into integrating Grin. It’s not the exchange, it’s not the devs and it’s not the community. Now just isn’t a good time for them unfortunately. Let’s take this as an opportunity to actually make the best integration flow we can for them when they get out of the mud they’re in.

This includes:

  1. No Tor (code/flow branching based on availability is an unnecessary complexity we add to them)
  2. RSR deposits (they should finalize to avoid any network hops and potential issues there)
  3. SRS withdrawals (same here)
  4. Think of all the possible cases that can happen (grin is different. Interactivity needs to be thought out well, but luckily, we only need to do that once)

The way the exchanges start the integrations will shape the way they all will integrate because they will reuse each other’s flow. Let’s make sure they have as few support tickets as possible and that the users have a nice and intuitive flow. I really do think this is an opportunity.
@vegycslol is playing around with the UX flows. Like with any other thing, some will like it some won’t, but as you already said, we have many people in the community willing to put in the time to try to improve this :+1:

8 Likes
#13

Tor is a headache and I’d say it leads to many related problems with connectivity and confusions. So, can we abandon Tor and use normal HTTP/SOCKs for background communication?

#14

Isn’t the point of using Tor that no IPs are leaked, while just using HTTP or other direct connections would leak them? I think that slatepack messages are a good fallback that can use any communication channel. Automation for handling them can be implemented on client side, so that the number of manual steps gets reduced. Ideally, it would be only 2 or 3 clicks/taps for a user, regardless of which communication method is used.

#15

But this is not ideal for transfering Grin from a mining pool to user wallet periodically and automatically.

#16

Yes, the TOR idea is good when you’re communicating with other random nodes. In this case you are already visiting the website of the exchange so if they want your IP, they will have it unless you go through a VPN/TOR.

In this specific case where there is already a communication channel available through the website, the no TOR option is more private because copying a string doesn’t reveal anything because you can’t know where it came from.

I think users wouldn’t need to have their wallet seed online at all. Let’s say you have 2 devices e.g. mobile phones.

  1. Phone A has a grin wallet with a view key only so you can recognize your outputs and see new confirmations
  2. Phone B is an old phone that is offline and has the actual seed that can sign messages
  3. Whenever you’re creating/receiving stuff you proxy the slatepack through NFC or whatever to phone B which is used as a signing device

The phone B could eventually be a proper hardware wallet used only for signing. I’m not exactly sure this would work, but I hope it can. People will need to have offline signing eventually.

3 Likes
#17

I agree that an easy to use offline signing method is very important to have.
Grin does not (yet?) seem to support view keys though.

If you visit the website through Tor, leaking the IP through HTTP would be even worse. Slatepack messages are probably in most cases preferable. For the exchange use case it does not really seem to be an issue, as TO shows. Where I see the value of Tor, is for scenarios like paying for a coffee without revealing my identity.

Not really supporting non-interactive use cases, like receiving donations or payouts from mining pools, seems to be a general weakness of MW, or at least Grin. I am not sure if having to have a permanently listening wallet is a really good solution for that, as it always seems to require to have the private keys online or some middle men for bridging the gap.

#18

So only slatepacks will be more useful for exchanges and payment channels? Like credit card shopping pay?)

You pay,a sms come and you confirm. Default mode is slatepack than Tor better.