Grin on phones?

Development and Technical Discussion
1

How hard would it be to have grin on cheap disposable phones, using sms to create transactions?

Imagine a world where a factory starts up in a 1$/day hellhole and instead of using the local currency they could hand out a shity 5 dollar phone(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utRww8-QuBw) as a starting bonus and use that as their payment system.

2

I feel like this isn’t a Grin-specific question, but ideally it should be very cheap to create and propagate a transaction. As for efficient verification with SPV, we potentially could use something like proofs of proof-of-work (and to build better sidechains ;))

1 Like
3

Grin needs a round trip to create a transaction, making it a very different sort of issue to say bitcoin.

  1. is the data that needs to be sent truly public, even for privacy weakening attacks?

  2. can the data fit inside text messages cleanly, while avoiding the known bugs with sms protocol(i.e. you can’t sent 8 null characters in a row being one I know of, or something like that, there may be others)

  3. How do you prevent man in the middle attacks? Seeing as phone companies are often viewed as a weak link in 2 factor authentication systems resetting sim cards thru customer service stupidly, without being annoying?

4

Any answer on these points? Thx

5

  1. the data sent are commitments to random numbers, and signatures, which can all be public.

  2. just use standard encoding rules to embed the binary data in text.

  3. obviously, a man in the middle can steal funds by pretending to be the receiver, and substituting his own messages for those of the real receiver. preventing this requires that the sender be able to authenticate the receiver, for instance by knowing their public key.

2 Likes