Cool ideas !
Having the wallet on a USB is already possible, you can run grin-wallet defining its location.
For example, you can even have the whole wallet software on the USB stick and run in like: grin-wallet.exe init --here
When you run it this way from a USB stick all the wallet data will be put in the same directory as grin-wallet.exe on the USB stick. When you unplug the USB, your funds will be completely safe from hackers.
If you also run the node software from the USB stick, there would not even be any trace that you used Grin on your computer after you unplug it. Rather cool when I think about it.
I do not think there are many crypto projects that could put the full nodes chain data on 10$ USB stick like you can do with Grin !
Even cooler IMO would be to run a wallet air-gaped, which would require some extra software, see this bounty proposal.
Regarding a plug-in miner, Grin has the advantage of grin mining being memory limited and not so power hungry, meaning powering a small chip through USB might actually be possible. On the downside, the chip would require lot of fast memory since cuckoo cycle is memory bound, which would mean a chip would easily become expensive making it very hard to compete with a G1 mini,
Precisely! It would be a fun and affordable little product to sell as a primer for those interested and holding Grin long-term or for those wanting to store in “cold storage”.
Good point. I think it may be possible but I am not familiar enough with chip hardware or design (nor have I done any research on this).
Any ideas for potential chip candidates? I was actually thinking more along the lines of a GPU implementation using the C31 algorithm but this presents its own set of challenges.
My whole operating principle is that there is no point in catering to cold storage for long term saving if we have no utility in the short term. There will be no long term without a short term.
For that reason, I would like to see a heavier focus on improving the utility of Grin for today, in every day use. To me, this means making Grin viable for buying and selling. Making a Venmo product, for example Venmo/Cashapp product planning Making it compatible with escrows Grin Escrow product planning and more
You should be able to run grin server as a daemon aka headless in the background. The GUI/TUI is nice looking, but I wish I could add grin server as a crown job @reboot so my node is executed at startup windowless.
If no one with the proper expertise is willing to do it, I’ll add it to my list of tasks related to learning about Grin and it’s finer details.
Would be nice to be able to use as a command flag, but this is just fine for me. Although it’s not quite in the background all the way as it’s not returned to the prompt. I have submitted an issue ticket for this on Github.
First install grin to /usr/local/bin which everyone should along with creating both a new user and group called grin to run the daemon, then you have to manually create the grin.service file and reload systemctl daemon , enable grin.service and run.
It doesn’t play super nice with grin-wallet either. It spits out a bunch of errors while starting the listener.
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I do not think there are many crypto projects that could put the full nodes chain data on 10$ USB stick like you can do with Grin 
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