Grin Community Candidate: John Davies

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Posted on behalf of John:

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 itā€™s future. For the first time in my life I started mining a cryptocurrency the day Grin launched and I never looked back. Iā€™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).

Which Funding Split Proposal do I support?

My top choice for how to split the funds would be Fund Alternative: Another Split Fund Proposal . While perfection is not possible, and some degree of centralization is mandatory, I still find it critical to be as decentralized as possible. I think the best way to achieve that is to have no single entity with >50% of resources. I think we need more voices, not fewer, and having more micro communities among the larger grin community would foster greater productivity and more avenues for recruiting and retaining people to the community.

My Views on Moving Forward

While the current council is not responsible for the demise of any of the failed open-source projects surrounding grin, 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 and think having three funded groups within the community would allow for more bandwidth to support the whole community. The value of a broad dev community that has available bandwidth to be engaged with the community was put on full display just this last week.

The three most critical components for funding decisions are the following:

  1. is it important/useful/critical
  2. is the funded entity capable of delivering
  3. 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 grinā€™s future and will be apart of it in any capacity that I am capable of.

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What is the reason that John does not post this himself?

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His account has been restricted for malarkey, shenanigans, and tomfoolery (the big 3)

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Iā€™m against this one. Heā€™s often helping people, especially with mining related things, but I donā€™t believe his behavior is appropriate for such a function.

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Heā€™s been a valuable contributor to the ecosystem for years. The only issues heā€™s had has been during disputes with the council. The community ā€œcouncilsā€ are supposed to represent those who feel disenfranchised by the existing council. Heā€™s exactly the type of person that belongs on an alternate council imho.

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I think he is valuable as well, I just donā€™t think heā€™s a good fit for this role. There are two different ways one can go about solving disagreements. You can either go the civil way or with personal attacks and heā€™s been doing personal attacks and attacks on the council/core way too often. Iā€™m not here to argue about this really, I just wanted to express my views on this proposal. Itā€™s a ā€œnoā€ from my side.

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I like John Davies, but sometimes his attacks were not appropriate. Therefore, I support both outcomes.

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The world is not about liking each other but getting things done, but in a respectful way. Otherwise it end in wars. I am not in favour of splitting funds, but i do support people that are being added to the grin masterminds. The more, the better, the faster.

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I second that. My ā€˜feelingsā€™ about John Davies are mixed. I think he is valuable member to the community, I respect his opinion in general, but I do feel that ā€œhistoricallyā€ his way of communicating was sometimes non-constructive or unecesarry negative.
Therefore if John Davies will become a council member, I hope he will improve his pro-active thinking on how his communication affects others and the community and project at large.
In other words, focus on the positive, if possible keep to much directness (OMG, never thought I would say that as a overly direct Dutch) and critisism to personal message and agree to disagree sometimes, multiple views can be correct or respected at the same time.

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Directness is oke, but do it smart and not in a provoking pushing way. Then you will lose the discussion in the end.

Also a team with strong opinions and minds are welcome. In the end you need some balance, yin and yang to hold it together.

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John Davies love Grin more than any council members.

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It is nice of you that you still can see that he is a valuable community member even his tone towards you was more than often absolutely inappropriate and insulting (at least what i have read in the Telegram Group).

With his rude comments on several occasions he got in his own way most of all, thus this application is so controversial. I hope he finally recognized the importance of a civil and constructive tone (not sure about that).
Also i think it is super important to give people a voice who have different opinions on topics and are vocal about it.
Different opinions are the most effective way to second-guess your own. Its a powerful tool as long as it is ensured that a final decision can be made without the different opinions slowing each other down.

The last few days i followed some discussions on some Grin-Copy-Paste-Shitcoins because its been interesting to me to see how they would react to the last incident with the fraudulent block, which they ā€œinheritedā€ by forking Grin.It is such a depressing read. These ā€œcommunitiesā€ are nothing but echo-chambers. Everyone is still super hyped about the trainwreck they sunk their investments into, you can read for hours and there is almost no negative opinion at all, although there is literally nothing that you could be positive about. I am pretty sure folks with negative opinions are being banned in microseconds.

We need diverse opinions. In hope for a more polite and constructive John Davis in the future iā€™m fine with him in the council.

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Imagine crying about supposed personal attacks from strangers on the internet in 2021.

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Which are the ā€œGrin-Copy-Paste-Shitcoinsā€ you are referring to?

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Epic Cash in particular

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I vote for John Davies. He clearly gets straight to the point with problems focusing on decentralization, security, and urgency (plus more) while also providing well thought out solutions. His understanding of the technology shows adequate knowledge. I donā€™t know Mac as well but Mac also seems to care about Grin a lot and Iā€™m guessing Mac has a good understanding of the technology.

ā€“ Lil Bit on Telegram and Twitter

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I vote for John Davies . He is honest, decisive and represents opinions that have been silenced for too long.

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