Elephant in the room

The big elephant in the room for GRIN right now is the send/receive mechanism and wallets. GUI wallets are improving but the fundamental way to send/receive is still broken.

It is already scary for many people to send Bitcoin transactions. Now imagine dealing with Grin. With the philosophy of the project being “a cryptocurrency for everyone, scalable for the real world, etc” – it’s rather meaningless if the UX is frightening to use.

As a fairly technical, avid crypto user/transactor, I still have not moved my Grin off the exchange because it is utterly frightening and clunky to do so.

Many naive Grin fans are thinking in a bubble – “oh I know how to do it, it’s easy, anyone should be able to” – but this is nonsense. Think of the average end user of the internet.

I know things are early, but aiming for mass adoption requires a way of thinking I’m not seeing in this community yet.

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Many people are working on many things, including this. There’s a lot to work on in general, which is evident by a quick glance at the Github repo.

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What about Ironbelly IOS wallet ? It should be easy and safe ?

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Go to my YouTube grin talk channel. I show people how to use grin ++ step by step.

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What your thoughts so far? Would you be open to a dialog about what you think a grin transaction experience should be like?

Yes. Are you on Grin Talk Telegram ?

  1. I encourage you to review https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin-rfcs/pull/24 and https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin-rfcs/pull/25, which are both designed to make sending and receiving more bitcoin-like.
  2. In the meantime, Grin++ and Niffler are both really easy to use, and have mechanisms to eliminate the need to setup port forwarding (although unfortunately introducing a trusted MITM as a result).
  3. No need to be “utterly frightened.” The only good thing about the interactive requirement of Grin is your coins can’t really be sent to the wrong address like it can in bitcoin. If your wallet fails to receive, then the tx can’t be built, so it will be credited back to you on the exchange.
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OP has a point here. Grin really needs an official GUI wallet, especially for windows. You have to understand that this is money and people are really frightened not to loose them in all those lines of code and command lines. Third party wallets are third party wallets.

I also started to keep Grin on different exchanges. The thought that someday a node might not sync or whatever and you can’t access your money is horrible.

P.S. Also the words: “It’s very young and experimental. Use at your own risk!” doesn’t help either to feel that your money is safe.

P.S.S. If I can keep my Grin on a ledger or trezor cold wallet, that would be something different. :slight_smile:

Just my 2 Grin.

Grin is young and experimental and is totally not safe, on any level.

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Yeah, we’re not at the stage of “rolling out” mass adoption for Grin. It’s still in a very centralized development stage and will hopefully be ready for real adoption in less than 1.5 years.

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I fully acknowledge how new this is and love so much about the project… but the principles of how transactions are done are foundational and I hope that can be figured out sooner than later, before more is built on-top of the protocol… It’s not so much a UX thing even, that will get taken care of over time.

1.5 years, this is probably not enough so far, I think they will need at least 2-2.5

as some one who is not technical at all I moved my Grin off Kucoin which was probably the most difficult of exchanges to do so.
Maybe boomers need to just die off already and let the generation of people who’ve supported their useless retirements move on with the world.

It is already scary for many people to send Bitcoin transactions. Now imagine dealing with Grin.

Actually, anybody who used both Bitcoin and Grin will know by experience that sending bitcoin is often terrifying, much more so than sending grins.

Why? Because, as David mentioned, it’s impossible to send grins into the void and lose them. It’s the biggest risk for newbies when dealing with bitcoin; Certainly an underrated advantage of interactive transaction building.

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