The community has come around multiple times and has been supportive. We’ll need a community that continues being very supportive for Grin to succeed.
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nice finding, i never read the interview before. The last sentence stuck on me, i’ll just leave it here:
“I’m convinced we really have a chance at making a broad positive impact on many people’s lives. Let’s not get lost in the weeds.”
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Excellent article! The truth is so important. False advertising helps no one
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I read the response, I can speak on this frequency.
Remember, we’re dealing with tech money. Grin’s features were ideal in 2019 but lagged behind many cryptocurrencies in 2023. In the next 5 years, the gap will bigger exponentially and there is a possibility maybe Grin will no longer be needed.
Think basicly, if Grin’s block time would be 10 minutes in 2019 and tps 10 in 1 minute, no one would interest it. Currently, Grin’s 1 minute block time and TPS are in the same position as this scenario. Normally, now we would test the 1 second process times, increase the confidentiality a little more, and apply some parts from Mina for scalability but where we are?
We’re talking about a coin that still can’t even use its own money for developer payouts. So don’t defend them if the main ideas are wrong. Also, sticking to the main ideas does not fit the idea of money of the future. No one use 2009 model iphone, right but Grin can be 2009 model iphone in 2029.
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Please describe exactly what you would do to reach faster finality, to improve privacy and scalability. I agree that if we keep the same security model while having better finality, privacy (to some extent) and scalability that’s a good thing. But without actual in depth proposals it’s just wishful thinking.
The original article is correcting misconceptions about Grin and basically helping us to find better and more accurate ways to “sell” the project.
I don’t see the original article as suggesting that we change the emission strategy of Grin. Rather the original article is pointing out how the emission strategy has been sold a bit dishonestly.
these points are mute
The word is “moot”
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What do you think has been sold dishonestly?
“Fairness” is subjective. Arguably this “fairness” works against itself because you need to incentivize early adopters to contribute and maintain the protocol when it is in its infancy more than ever.
“Free from hype” is circumstantial. Grin would love to have moon boys, let’s be honest. It would increase the eyes on project and have more developers interested.
“Privacy” is just good enough at best. MW is better sold as a scaling technology.
“Time coin” is more of a coincidence than inherent to the design.
Basically exactly as the article is pointing out.
I think the best selling point of Grin is probably just simplicity. The rest is like… “neat”. A bonus.
Simplicity + “good enough” bonuses that don’t harm the simplicity
Making a project more fair makes it harder to bring new people in because most people are in it for the money so they prefer to contribute to projects where they can quickly get rich. I would treat this as a property that comes with fairness. If it survives the first decade then i would treat more fair project to be more resilient than less fair ones. Also miners have always been paid fairly, which is important.
Getting more moon boys might bring more developers but what would you change to get more moon boys?
Why would you need to improve privacy if it’s good enough? Anything that’s above good enough is unwanted complexity imo, so it’s worse than the good enough solution. I do think privacy is currently good enough, i understand that some might want more of it.
I don’t think that tromp suggested 60 coins per block randomly, the idea behind it seems pretty clear. It might not have been planned before that, but why not take an additional nice property if it’s for free?
It’s easy to say “privacy could have been better”, “emission discourages holding and reduces interest in the project” etc, that’s all the truth, but what would you have done differently if you could go back in time and change grin project. I’ve never seen any lies or intentional deceiving from grin contributors, so who is responsible for these misconceptions (i don’t know which tbh)?
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“In it for the money” = “get rewarded for promoting and maintaining the project”
See how “fair” is a bit subjective. Being rewarded for your work isn’t unfair.
The only way to see big price increases in Grin is to improve the UX. Monetary policy is never changing. So the only hope is for incredible UX. Invoices, payment proofs, etc. optional Venmo type experience
The only way to counteract the inflation is more adoption, which needs better UX to attract users.
You would need to improve privacy if you’re advertising it as a privacy coin. You see what I’m saying? It’s about bad marketing vs good (accurate) marketing.
Don’t advertise it as a privacy coin. Make sure everyone knows the facts and isn’t misrepresenting anything.
There is a point at which DYOR hurts. Because not every will do their own research and butthurt people are bad for morale.
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Not being rewarded for your work when rules are known in advance is not unfair, it’s just a bad worker’s decision (if he wanted to make money).
UX will improve, would be surprised if price would increase before inflation drops quite a bit more (not a financial advice, i have no clue about prices, so it’s just intuition).
I would say that privacy coin is a coin whose privacy is good enough (whatever that means). To me grin has such privacy. If a coin with perfect privacy existed, would you still call monero a privacy coin? I would, even if it doesn’t have the best privacy out there. I think it’s better to look at it as how good privacy a coin has instead of how good privacy it has compared to other privacy coins.
You’ll never reach a state where everyone knows facts about the coin. I don’t think grin misrepresented itself when it said it’s a privacy coin, although i agree that scalability is the main advantage (privacy is jist a nice bonus). My guess is that you can’t avoid butthurt people.
Perhaps a more relevant question is whether there are some barriers to people using an asset for real world payments. A transparent asset has serious issues because it exposes at least partial holdings of the user. This is an undesirable feature for any financial system. Having blinded amounts and no addresses is just a way to solve this problem and increase the chance for adoption. That’s theory of course, there’s a lot more things that need to happen for real adoption…
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If by ‘solve this problem’ you mean ‘give everyone false confidence about their privacy’, then I completely agree.
Love Grin, but the privacy claims are vastly overstated. Until coinswap exists, touting Grin as a privacy coin is dishonest false advertising.
He explicitly stated that this means
which MW solves by hiding amounts and not having addresses.
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Grin is not claiming to be a “privacy coin”, that is why explicitly each time the term “privacy preserving” is used.
The way I see it, grin is a fair, minimal and elegant coin that as bonus (basically free considering historic transaction size), gets blinded amounts and no addresses. IMO, the privacy this offers is huge. Not knowing the amounts in a transaction is the most important privacy feature. Linkability of the transactions graph is not a big privacy leak since there is no link to an address, or identity except for with exchanges who have access to KYC information and know the amounts of bought and sold grin.
For me grin is the perfect sweet-spot in “privacy preservation”. Extra privacy is normally only important for those who wish to use crypto for illegal purposes, and personally I prefer them to use “real privacy coins” such as Zcash and (to lesser extend) Monero which do come with huge costs in terms of blockchain bloat for their privacy.
See post above 
, it does not get more objective than that comparison IMO.
This is important for financial system. Thx to MimbleWimble, it’s unique from all sides. I am sure banks will use our technology for CBDC when it will be “ready” and more tested. So by that time Grin can have more attention as only free alternative of digital cash.
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He states it ‘solves this problem’. I insist the problem is not solved. People are merely given false confidence. I thought my comment was clear, but I guess I should have been explicit.
Ah yes, the good old “if you’re not doing anything illegal, you have nothing to hide” logic. That’s the same logic that brought us fan favorites, such as the US’s Patriot Act. I love it. /s
I am not sure why we need TOR by default then 
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For “bad guys” we will have mwixnet, so I think we are safe. Fungibility is the most important part. Anyway govt will not stop us, maximum they can do is block transactions at CEXs, but this is not Grin target anyway, our field is censorship resistant systems like DEXs/P2P.
For Bitcoin things are even worse, they will censor txs at pools level, not possible with MimbleWimble 
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