Previously, we have been calling Bitcoin digital gold, when in fact, based on the characteristics of Bitcoin, it is not continuously minable and not anonymous enough to be called digital gold at all.
We’ve been calling Grin digital cash, which is also unrealistic. Cash is a currency that can be issued at will, with no fixed issuance rate, and with so many fiat currencies in the world, it’s not uniform.
In fact, Grin has more of the same characteristics as gold.
Therefore, we should boldly say the more accurate slogan:Grin is digital gold.
I sure hope not. Gold doesn’t work as money (for several reasons), and always leads to a system of banks to provide reserve notes (which eventually get replaced by baseless fiat) to be used as money. I don’t want to live in a world of grin banks for the same reasons I don’t want gold banks. Banks are bad for freedom.
I am here for digital money. Not digital gold. Bitcoin’s digital gold narrative is just cope, because they realize they can’t scale to become money. Lets not fall for the same trap.
I do not think we should call Grin digital gold. Sure, many including myself call Bitcoin digital gold which is not really true since Bitcoins supply keeps getting lower (1.76% last year) both in relative and absolute sence due to the halving of the mining reward. Golds stock to flow ratio is around 70, so 1.43% inflation, close to Bitcoin at the moment.
Grin has a stock to flow ratio of 4, so 25% inflation at the moment. Sure, on the long run Grin’s supply is more similar to gold, but at the moment Grin is NOT a good store of value. Calling Grin digital gold will only lead to FOMO and disapointment from those who do not understand supply rates. Grins properties do make it excellent as private scalable digital cash, which IMO is and will be a much better description for Grin.
Imo grin is not digital gold and is not digital cash. Grin is just grin. Imagine how ridiculous it would sound if people, before they started using gold as sov, would say “gold is golden cigarette” (i don’t know what was used before gold, let’s use cigarette as an example even though they came way later). Grin is just a decentralized system which gives you some properties that are nice (higher security due to its simplicity is just one of them). So comparing grin to gold and cash should be considered an insult since they both have worse properties (even if now gold is more suitable as a SOV, over long term grin surpasses it)
That’s cute, but ridiculous. Even though Grin is beautiful in its simplicity, it isn’t just an art project. It exists to provide a utility to people. It exists to become money. Not gold. Not cash. Not even currency. Those are terms for things that tried to be money, but didn’t succeed (or succeeded with drastic compromises). Grin exists to become money, hopefully better than all prior forms of money.
If it fails to achieve that, then Grin is just an art project in the history of human technology.
It doesn’t exist to become money, that’s what you would like to see it become. I don’t see anything wrong with grin being used as a sov, humanity needs a good sov and grin seems like a good choice to me (not now, but as it gets older). Until someone figures out how grin could support many transactions per second i don’t see why anyone would want to use it as money (talking about global adoption, same goes for btc). I’m nowhere near an expert on L2 solutions but i was once on a LN presentation and it seemed like an ugly solution to me, so i don’t support money being on L2 (unless some other L2 design is actually nice).
I too am here for digital money, not gold. Obviously transaction rate is not a near term problem, but does grin have a long term solution to the transaction rate limitation? I understand from an old video that grin has a transaction rate similar to Bitcoin. Is that correct? If so, is there an anticipated solution that is just being deferred?
Bitcoin needs a competitive fee market to fund miners. Hence the block size limit needs to be low enough so that users are still adequately funding mining operations. If the block limit is too high, there wont be any competition and they will always pay the lowest possible fee for the quickest transactions.
Grin has a constant inflation rate of 1 grin per second. That means miners will always be guaranteed a reward for mining blocks. Therefore they do not rely on fees from txs. Block sizes could be increased without any effect on the game theory system.
Nevertheless, there can still be some negative consequences of increasing a block size limit. Drawbacks include network propagation rate and blockchain size increase. Grin has a block size of 1.5MB per minute so transferring that information globally may take some time. If it is too much information to transfer, chains may begin to diverge and come into conflict. If you don’t end up on the longest chain, your transaction could be reversed. For those reasons L2 solutions like payment channels are oftentimes recommended.
Thanks. That was helpful. I would like to better understand the math myself but suffice to say it does not look like Grin is ideal for everyone to use for everyday purchases like buying gas at gas station. Visa for instance, appears to support “24,000 transactions per second” per a quick google search. Visa of course is not private or decentralized… I am not suggesting this is apples-to-apples comparison or that 24,000 TPS is “Needed”, but grin is a long way off. Grin may be “Electronic transactions for all” but it sounds like we would need a layer 2 to become, “all electronic transactions for all”. Unfortunate.
This is a very good point. No doubt a lot of thought went into the 1 minute block time regarding potential for chain splits. That does seem like a risk the more I think of it. The website says, “It’s very young and experimental. Use at your own risk!” so it is fair to be experimental. However, it has been out for a few year now, do we have an understanding yet as to the frequency of forks associated with the one minute blocktime?
The block time is not an issue. 1.5 MB per minute is only 25KB/s. Even in rural Africa you have that kind of speed (in practice its about 10x higher).
Note that not all nodes need to be seeders. Extremely slow nodes can also chose to only download blocks and not seed them. Therefore only 25KB/d download is needed, not upload.
To upscale, grin has relative time locked kernels needed for basic Lightening payment channels. I do not think we will need them in the next 10 years, but if we do, the basic functions are already there since Hard Fork 4, the last sheduled hardfork ( jan 5 2021).
That would also be 25KB per Grin. And only about 14 transactions per Grin. I wonder if these relations matter on the physics of Grin.
For example if a grin transaction costs less then 0.07 grin, that seems to be a special case, where grin is not primarily medium of exchange.
There are many functions of money, such as payment function, value storage function and measurement function, but the value storage function is the most basic function and the source of other functions.
If it don’t have a value storage function, other counterparties won’t accept it at all, you won’t have a payment function, and then there’s no measurement function without mass use.
One of the problems with the design of grin is that they make grin worthless in the short term,The goal of this design is to motivate people to spend their grin,But the designer forgets that the user doesn’t want to have grin at all,as a result,there is no grin to motivate people to spend.
Disclaimer: I am a grin enthusiast and I hope that grin users will become more and more.The above remarks are not against grin, but rather raise questions to make grin project better.
Grin doesn’t scale that much better on-chain. About 4x for historical tx footprint, which is less than an order of magnitude. Both can only really scale off-chain…
Let us Acknowledge that the Grin are the same as Bitcoin, but better in Fairness, security, and privacy.
grin is bitcoin with tail- issued,Gin is a bitcoin issued by more than 21 million
