Grin Marketing - 7 things to love about Grin

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Dear all, I felt the need to create a draft proposal for Grin marketing.
Grin is a beautiful project and it sometimes feels like the initial spark of enthusiasm we all felt gets buried in the process of technical discussions and diverse opinions. Let us all remember why we love Grin.
To help re-ignite (pun intended) this enthusiasm in both old and new Grin users, I though it would be good to list what makes Grin so great. The list below is intended for use in marketing such as medium blogs, Twitter (@Paouky) or use in youtube videos. Before going full blown out on the marketing maybe, the list below should be scrutinised by the community and we should have a mobile wallet which works with single step transactions. Single step transactions on a mobile wallet and a bit more positivism is all that stands in the way of Grin and Greatness in my opinion.
Below my list of ā€˜Seven things to love about Grinā€™ (Yes 7 was chosen on purpose):

  1. ELECTRONIC TRANSACTIONS FOR ALL. The mission statement of Grin goes back to the raison dā€™ĆŖtre of Bitcoin and the cypher punks who created it:

"Electronic transactions for all. Without censorship or restrictions. Grin is designed for the decades to come, not just tomorrow. Grin wants to be usable by everyone ā€” regardless of borders, culture, skills or access.ā€

  1. MOST SAFE TO USE. Transactions are made through communication between wallets. This interactivity makes it impossible to accidentally send GRIN to a non-existing address. Transactions therefore are like bank transfer, the system checks if the receiver exist, if not ā€“ the transaction will be cancelled just like a normal bank transfer would.

  2. MOST SECURE. Grin stores transactions in a highly efficient way making the blockchain small enough to be stored on any mobile device. All incoming transactions will be validated against the full node you are running on your mobile phone.

  3. MOST PRIVATE DAY TO DAY CRYPTO CURRENCY. Grin has a high level of privacy, what is best, this privacy comes at no additional cost to the user. It is mathematically impossible to deduce the amount of GRIN involved in a transaction.

  4. SCHOCKINGLY LOW TRANSFER FEES. Considering Grin is a privacy coin, one would expect there to be a high transaction cost for GRIN, the opposite is the case. What is better, since Grin is and always will be created at the speed of 1 Grin/second, transfer fees will always be shockingly low since miners can always pay their costs from the supply of Grin. This ensures Grin will be the cheapest day to day privacy coin to use.

  5. FAIR SUPPLY. Grin does not use an Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) or pre-mining to benefit investors or the developers. Grin is and always will be distributed Fairly at 1 Grin/second.
    Therefore, Grin is equally rewarding early and late adopter. Mining fees encourage mining by regular users who only need a high end video card to earn and contribute in the mining process. Additionally, the linear supply of Grin wards of gold seekers and on the long run is expected to result in a high price stability.

  6. COMMUNITY FUNDED. Grin development is one of the few crypto projects around, next to Bitcoin and Monero, that is purely depended on community funding. The community is involved in the development process and has a voice in where funds are spent, and which tasks are prioritized by the core developers.

I know there are many more things to love about Grin such as 8) being highly scalable, 9) being create by the great Lord Voldemort himself, but I felt these 7 things to love are what actually matters from a users perspective. Feel free to add, improve the text or comment:

Would it be nice to have a marketing folder on Github where list such as this one can be edited by all and folders with Memes, pictures and links to videoā€™s can be compiled? Also having a marketing category on the forum would be nice, or should it be combined with the ā€˜Marketā€™ category?

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interesting idea. Iā€™ve got a few comments regarding each point:

  1. ā€˜Electronic transactions for allā€™ is not a mission statement, itā€™s just a nice slogan. Grin itself has no mission and no statement, itā€™s a tool for individuals to use.
    I believe that sentence was first used here.
    If somebody has a mission for grin, itā€™s nothing but his own mission.

  2. Side note: A common problem among bitcoin users is that of sending bitcoin back to a 'from addressā€™. For example, Alice sends 1btc to Bob, and a week later Bob wants to return 0.5btc back to Alice. He might look at their past tx and just send it to the address he got it from. Intuitively, it makes sense. Practically, however, that could potentially be a very bad move, explained in detail here.
    Point is, the term ā€˜non-existing addressā€™ which you used, is not always appropriate. An address may technically exist but is no longer under Aliceā€™s control, for many possible reasons.

  3. Thatā€™s a bold statement to make. First of all, I wouldnā€™t say that a light node also means grin is ā€˜most secureā€™. Security encompasses many other things beyond being able to fully validate with minimal resources.
    Besides, is anybody even running a mobile node?
    Instead, I would say something along the lines of ā€˜cheap to validateā€™.

  4. I need to think a bit more about this one.

  5. The tx fees are low because there is no shortage of block space (not even close). It doesnā€™t have anything to do with the block reward. What the never-ending block reward does achieve, is that long term, Grinā€™s security spend is going to be much larger:
    Constant emission -> Higher reward from blocks -> Miners spend more capital on equipment and electricity -> Higher cost of attaining a large hashrate of the network and attacking the network.
    Most PoW currencies will be shockingly easy and tempting to attack in a few years, especially in times when demand for block space isnā€™t high thus fees are low.
    This is a nice overview of the subject in regards to Bitcoin.

  6. I would re-word this one to be clear that constant emission has two main benefits: 1) Fair supply, as you say. Grin doesnā€™t favor early developers and users with exponentially higher emission. Late comers have a fair opportunity to join and are not turned off. 2) Long term security for the chain (as explained above).

  7. Iā€™d add that a centralized development team is a huge attack vector, especially for privacy-focused currencies. To survive for years, itā€™s essential for the project to be 100% community based, as it is right now.

Cool initiative @Anynomous, well done. I really encourage you to open some kind of shared folder to collect ā€œmarketingā€ content. It doesnā€™t have to be (and shouldnā€™t be) in the actual grin docs, but as a private side project that allows anybody to contribute or make use of.

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@Paouky Thx for your input and well founded opinion. Nice to see the link to the original discussions of the ā€œmission statementā€, from the early days. I am still thinking how to phrase -1) since it is just a description that roughly captures the objective of what Grin is about for many. I know it is not exactly accurate to call it a mission statement since Grin is not created by a company and has different meanings to different people. However, from a marketing point of view it would be good to settle for one that we can all live with. I just need to find a more appropriate phrasing than ā€œmission statementā€.

-2) Regarding this point, to me the major benefit is not only that you cannot send to old addresses from a user that might not be in used any more, but that you cannot send it to an address which is the result of a typo. If you would for example delete or replace on character of the TOR address you are sending a transaction to, the reaction would bounce right. In Bitcoin I find the major drawback that such a typo can result in a valid address, just not own by any private key that is in use, resulting in funds being destroyed forever. I will change it to ā€œaddress not actively in useā€ since this captures both use cases.

-5) True about the security argument, it is rather important so I should include that somewhere since it strengthens Grinā€™s usability for the long term. As I understand it, once the block rewards get insufficient to pay miners, transaction prices go up like they do now with Bitcoin to partly compensate for this loss of income. So, the argument that transfer prices are low, and stay low will still hold, right? I will make a comparison table for the transaction cost of an average transaction with for example, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monnero, Grin, Zcoin, Zen etc. I am confident Grin will be the cheapest by far especially when compared to other privacy coins.

-7) Cool, I did not even consider what the decentralised governance and funding model for Grin implied in terms of security. I will try to incorporate that argument. I should mention Grin in tandem with all other purely community funded crypto currencies since these are in general well renowned coins. Does anyone have a list, I thought there were about 5 or so.

I will improve the phrasing of the arguments to be more accurate while keeping them easy to understand for non-technical users. I on purpose wrote it like a marketeer and not from a technical perspective, however, making false or weak claims would of course result in negative marketing so I do have to make it as accurate as possible. I will repost it once I had time to incorporate all feedback.

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This discussion made me realize that the only actual overview of grin is on github. And even that is way too long for somebody who just wants to familiarize themselves briefly with the project. Thatā€™s not good.

grin.mw has to have a short and solid overview.
Also as a side note, the descriptions in CMC and messari need revisiting too.

Iā€™ll give it all a go in the next few days.

Note

If anybody with native English wishes to lend a hand that would be very helpful (but not absolutely necessary). Just hit me up on keybase.

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For what itā€™s worth, I though english was your native language. I agree with this, educational content available right now is for those that wish to learn and take the time. Not everyone needs to understand how Mimblewimble works under the hood, itā€™s enough to know what properties it gives compared to other solutions. I think an unofficial website with a simple visual representation of cut-through, blinded amounts and aggregation would immediately show why such design could be interesting.

I remember watching Poelstraā€™s talk and this part https://youtu.be/aHTRlbCaUyM?t=741 blew my mind. Back then, I didnā€™t know what a Pedersen commitment was nor did I know anything about elliptic curves, but it worked because you donā€™t need to understand its inner working to appreciate the benefits it brings.

Iā€™m all for sharing/brain storming ideas around educational content.

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Can put in official:)

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Speaking of #6, I was trying to explain grin emission to a former naysayer. The graphic won him over, look at his reply! ā€œA solution as simple as it is ingeniousā€

image
image918Ɨ1193 154 KB

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A picture is worth a thousand words, especially when explaining something such as infinite supply. Something like this would also be good in the educational part of Grin for non-technicians. Intuitively it removes the feeling of infinite supply as a treat.

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What I had in mind was to represent the concepts in pictures similar to

grinn2
grinn2868Ɨ1754 240 KB

so to avoid showing too many concepts to the user or just going too deep into them.

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I think the trouble with marketing grin is that it comes across as not being super serious and almost cunning. Iā€™m still learning about Grin tbh, and what brought me towards is it is the passion of the dev team, also Charlie Leeā€™s potential/pending adoption of the mimblewimble in LTC. I think a lot of use case is adoption and actual use by those not interested in the investment side so much as actually roadtesting it and getting comfortable with alternative methods of transaction.

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  1. Transfer fees.
    I think a good working POW cryptocurrency should have the majority of the Miner rewards from the fees, not from the new coins. I would like to see if in a few years grin has an average transaction fee of 0.1 to 0.5 grin. So about 50% to 90% of the rewards are fees. And the price per coin doesnā€™t need to exceed past prices. Lower fees with 2nd layer scaling would be nice, if needed.
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I am suprised by that argument :sweat_smile:.
In general the consensus is purely paying the security of blockchain from fees creates some problems.

  • The number of transactions per block varies, as well as the total amount send. Paying the sucurity by fees means that some blocks have much higher security (asuming more fees = more mining power put into it) than others.
  • For miners it would mean the block reward would fluctuate a lot, although this can be solved by buffering/pooling the transaction fees over multiple blocks.
  • For users this would mean normal transactions become too expensive to make day to day transactions, although as you mention, second layer transactions would solve this

The only reason Grin has a somewhat high transaction fee (e.g. compared to Beam) is to protect users and the mempool from spam attacks with many small transactions.

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I can explain my surprising argument further. Paying the security of blockchain from new coins that can last forever, creates some also problems.

  • I think for POW it would be always a security problem, if ā€œmarket capā€ is (much) higher than the cost of rebuilding all the work.

  • miner rewards from fees donā€™t create incentive to rebuild old blocks, from the genisis. But rising coin prises or cheaper graphs/hashes do.

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:thinking: I think you are missing a step in your reasoning.
I think you forgot to adjust the cost of a reorg (rebuilding from the genesis block) with increasing difficulty which is linear with increases in the price of Grin.
The market cap of Grin is proportional to:

block_height * 60_Grin.

So, actually, the costs of rebuilding from the genesis block are linearly to the amount of blocks/time * the price of grin since the difficulty increases with increasing prices:

block_height * 60 * the current_price_grin * the_difficulty

Having a fixed/steady mining reward that pays for blocks security makes it expensive to perform a 51% attack attempting a reorg. Basically with a constant mining reward you make sure that security is always there, even if a block would be empty and without transactions.
Higher prices combined with a fixed mining fee also improve security. If the prices go up, the hash/graph rate naturally increases as well since it is more lucratif to mine.

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Higher prices combined with a fixed mining fee also improve security in an absolute way. But the incentive to break the security is ā€œimprovedā€ even more by the higher prices. I think the security (pow) must be seen relative to the intensive breaking it.

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@Doogevol You have a fair point, that if the price of a coin increases, the insentive to break past security (which is lower since the difficulty of past block was proportional to the past prices) increases.
In practicse it is way to expensive to do a reorg that goes back that many blocks, but if an asset would litteraly explode in value, this would create a security risk. Which makes me wonder why no-one has ever tried to do this for Bitcoin? Probably some other fail safes are in place. I know there are failsafes for grin, e.g. manually cutting of part of the network as well as grindefender, a fund to counter any sudden icrease in hashing power. Such an attack would also lead to a huge drop in the value of such a coin which would automatically make such an attack unatractif. This problem is however the same when paying security from fees or through a fixed miing reward. If you would use high transaction fees from users to pay for security, past blocks also would have low difficulty and as such would over the long term be equally lucratif to redo if there would be a sudden increase in price and would end up being non-lucratif since the price would crash.

Anyhow, the biggest isue with high fees is that it de-insentivises user to make transactions. A coin that no-one wants to use only has speculatif power. Therefore transaction should be cheap, even if the cost is a higher inflation. Actually that is one of the few things that fiat transactions got right, inflation and low transaction fees are good for adoption and day to day use.

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On bitcoin this unbalance (marketcap/securitywork) is really extreme evolved, because the extreme progress in mining efficiency, extreme prise increase and continuous reward halvings. Every single factor is less extreme for grin. But Iā€™m wondering if that is enough. And even Iā€™m not sure if bitcoin will see complete reorgs.

If there are contracts with bitcoin, it depends on the exact definition what bitcoin actually is. But if the definition is: Bitcoin is, what the first satoshi client says. Bitcoin is overpriced because someone could sell and deliver 18.000.000 BTC for 6000 USD each. (Again and again)

Newer Clients have checkpoints.

https://bitinfocharts.com/de/comparison/fee_to_reward-btc-eth.html#1y

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The most important way that coins protect against 51% attacks is through incentives. E.g. especially when mining using ASICā€™s that are only used by a few coins, making an attack would mean you have to make a huge investment to get your hands on 51% of these ASICS. If you would do an attack, the price would plummet and your ASICā€™s would become worthless. Also it is very difficult to get 51% of the hashing power in ASICs without someone noticing. Although Grin has ASICā€™s now, the majority of the hash/graph power comes from GPU miners.
So, a first step to improve security is to have even more ASICā€™s like the G1 Mini and G1 miner from iPollo to secure Grin. Anyhow, I am not concerned by Grinā€™s security, doing a complete reorg is basically impossible and simply would lead to loss of value of the project. The only reason someone would want to do something like that is to try to destroy a coin, because it would not be profitable at all.

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A few thoughts on marketingā€¦

Current logo looks a bit like an acid house tab from the early 90s. Which I guess gives it a bit of an underground feel. Which is good. Looks quite friendly too.

However you sell things by creating a need for them. The selling point is privacy and fungibility. Though low transport costs is also a biggie. Also many people see bitcoin as a pyramid scam due to the ease of mining initially.

So the way I explained Grin to a non techy friend was that bitcoin was like the ealry internet, or http. Everyone could see what you were doing and you didnā€™t necessarily trust it for small transactions. It is slow, non fungible as people can and do refuse to accept coins that were used on the silk road for instance.

Grin is https. Or to anyone not tehnical enough to understand that, it uses magic. Itā€™s fast, itā€™s fungible and itā€™s cheap. Thereā€™s also no time barrier to entry as 1 is created every second and always will be.

The whole Harry potter thing though is a potential source of publicity. Whilst I think the author is a slap arsed talentless harridan, that might even be an advantage. If we could get her railing against the idea that her made up name is being usedā€¦ She has a wide reach. It isnā€™t as though someone can sue a cryptocurrency for copyright infringementā€¦

Also it might be worth talking up the banned aspectā€¦ If an exchange delists it, it has been banned. People want things they arenā€™t allowed to have. People also want things which are hard to get. Bitcoin is hard to get due to the hashing power required, but itā€™s dead easy on every single exchange. Grin, not so much.

Personally I think the biggest publicity draw for cryptocurrencies generally is actual coins. Images floating around t-interweb of actual physically minted bitcoin, eth, doge or a handful of others solidifies in the average plebs mind that it is a ā€˜thingā€™. Course though theyā€™re all pristine gold, silver and have fancy greek symbols on themā€¦ Which isnā€™t what people think of when they think everyday currency. They look lik the collectorā€™s coins which sad old bastards hoard on their mantlepieces.

To be truly adopted a crypto coin has to be everyday currency. Likely outside of DeFi this will start with gaming. Though do you really want to missus to be able to check how much you really spent on naked ladies, beer or your hobby?

So Iā€™d suggest tapping up the sad harry potter fan nerds who might buy out of mongness, maybe crowdfunding the minting of some actual cheap looking copper Grins which are somewhat potter themed on one side, annoying the scottish illiterate feminist harridan and painting Grin as the future that they are trying to ban.

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Regarding physical coins, the first physical coins are being mined (3D printed) and went for sale 3 days ago:

I think there many in the community who dig Harry Potter, including myself, so am not sure about the idea of getting Rowling against Grin. Although this could most certainly lead to most publicity and as such higher price, I think most community members actually do not care enough about the price to include negative publicity.

But you are right that some aspects such as being banned or being ā€˜deadā€™ are actually great for memes and for publicity. Hence we celebrate them, here is an example of celebrating the negative ranting of a community member which is actually rather amuzing :stuck_out_tongue:
https://forum.grin.mw/t/leadership-and-responsibility-the-positive-influence-of-grin-boss-on-grin/9069/10

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