What does Grin have that nobody else has? The simplicity?
No other coin has that AFAIK. It’s supremely simple, while also providing an anti-fragile emission strategy, good enough privacy for everyday use, and other things. Every other feature is downstream from simplicity in terms of the market fit?
Simplicity is the one thing that cannot be attained after the fact. Reminds me of this
The Tao gives birth to One. One gives birth to Two. Two gives birth to Three. Three gives birth to all things
Besides TO, there are no exchanges actively supporting Grin. No major projects adopt it as a crypto. The trading volume is practically nonexistent. The roadmap offers little promise of anything groundbreaking in the near future. And the policy from those running the project seems to be: “Do the bare minimum and hope something changes.” A laissez-faire management at it’s worst. So ask yourself this. Why would anyone go through the hassle of buying and holding Grin? Why take the risk, when there’s no adoption, no liquidity, and no compelling reason beyond nostalgia or ideology? It’s a question many have asked before. Most of them aren’t around anymore. And those who are still here turn a blind eye to the trajectory this project is on silencing the last few voices who dare to hold a different opinion.
Grin has multiple advantages going for it, but indeed, if you would have to pick some, it would be its “fair, mininal and scalable design”.
When you mention grin also had other great properties, like privacy preserving, fungible I think many people just cannot “compute” how all of those properties can simultaneously exist.
Having it all sounds impossible, magical - and it is .
For so long the assumption has been that privacy and scalability cannot be achieved simultaneously, yet, that is exactly what mimblewimble has done. @Rust hate it or love it, but I doubt another breakthrough like this will happen any time soon.
The fact that there is no one in charge is another point for Grin, in the long run.
Adoption is a bit antithetical to “buying and holding”, but I get what you mean.
As of now, Grin has an ideology (simplicity + 1 coin per second + privacy), and the fact that it’s not controlled by anyone. Fertile soil. Just need a good UX for it.
Grin’s simplicity is a differentiator. Tromp has a great post about it on bitcointalk [1]. Another differentiator is the supply function. Bitcoin is an experiment with a hardcap supply that is locked in time in a somewhat asymmetrical way, likely done so to incentivize early adoption. Grin takes a much slower approach. It started counting seconds on 2019-01-15 16:01:26 UTC with what could be described as a best effort automated second counting regulation - a highly responsive DAA. In simple terms, it tries to clone UTC seconds into a digital world (Grin network) where they can be exchanged and used as a currency. I think this is the big experiment behind Grin. Technology will continue to improve and there’s not much that can be done about it. But if you started counting first and one “tick” takes equally long for all clocks then the only way to outrun the clock that started first is if the clock stops ticking. My understanding is that as long as Grin’s DAA remains the best mapping function and Grin doesn’t fail as a network, it will be the clock/time as a currency with the biggest supply of “linearized time”. The question no one can answer is whether humanity will need linearized time as a currency and whether Grin can help with this, hence why this project is an experiment.
I don’t think this is happening but I do think that Grinners should focus on what makes Grin great, new, different, not a fork and less on what grin has that bitcoin doesn’t or memes that are just bullying other coins. That’d be great if this project had large scale adoption but
I think one thing that slips the minds of anyone looking into the world of cryptocurrency is that there was a time that bitcoin was not seen as useful. After a while, bitcoin was seen as useful, adoption skyrocketed, and here we are. Grin is new and different in many ways but people aren’t seeing it for what it is yet, like bitcoin – because there’s a severe lack of understanding and right intention when it comes to cryptocurrency:
People wanna get rich, fast. A majority of folks who enter into this sphere are looking for that quick 5x’er and if you tell them that’s not an intention of a coin they look at you like you’re stupid. They are at least looking to buy “digital gold” and they only see that in bitcoin. The technology difference to me is akin to flip-phones (bitcoin) and the smart phone (grin) (please feel free to give me a better analogy), but people do not see grin that way. For me, the fact that this is a totally original source based on a totally original concept mimblewimble with a fair beginning makes it very appealing. This sentiment is absolutely not commonplace amongst anyone in the crypto world. They want money money money and they will NOT use crypto, they will sell it and buy whatever in fiat because even if there is any interest in a “privacy coin” these people are actually okay with the status quo.
At the core of all of this is the perception of money though, it has very little to do with fiat, grin, bitcoin or any other form of currency. It has to do with a misunderstanding of what good currency is in the first place. That’s a problem that can’t be solved, because at the end of the day the economic problem for the commoner is: how do I provide for my family with the least friction? How will GRIN solve this? I can think of a few ways, and it’s probably a good thing to start thinking about how to solve that with GRIN. Unfortunately for the world, it’s hard to get them to see anything other than what’s provided to them or what the majority of other people use.