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.
I have a friend who still plays D2 and often buys and sells items via a forum, which has its own currency. You cannot transfer is currency or anything so its more like a internal thing for this community, at least in my understanding.
If we could make it easy for developers to integrate Grin instead of making their own internal reward systems and make it easy to accept grin for micropayments + integrated atomic swap functionality this would be a powerful stack imo. Maybe also with the option for the admin to charge a fee on the transfers (to give an incentive to use it), this in total would be a superior option.
My logic is that if its really easy to implement, people will build something with it which would lead to usage. Unfortunately I dont see how anyone in the real world would accept it as a means of payment for anything valuable, considering that you cannot buy anything with it and that its not that easy to exchange for money.
Indeed, if we can provide tools that facilitate the easy integration of GRIN as a payment method, it would greatly boost its adoption. For example, a WordPress plugin could be one such tool
The tough thing is that payment proofs are not the killer app. The stuff that is built with the payment proofs are the killer apps.
Stuff like new contract flow and payment proofs are not sexy. They’re not attractive to developers. Wallets, marketplaces, bots, messengers, torrenting, these things are sexy.
What is it we actually need right now regarding Payment Proofs? Is it that there is a bug that needs fixing? I though bidirectional payment proofs are in the grin-wallet Contract Branch code. Or do we need an external verifier for payment proofs (not that private), or is it that there is no support for payment proofs in GUI wallets like Grim and Grin++?
Sorry, I am to lazy to check all the details myself, beside we should distribute, being on top of everything is too much.
If it is just a bug, perhaps I can have look at it and see if I can fix it.
Early payment proofs working and enabled by default in the contracts branch of the wallet, see related PR here:
Really, the best way to get payment proofs live would be to get the experimental contracts branch working within Grim and test,test,test to the point where we’d be comfortable merging all of the work in the contracts branch to master.
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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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for Grin, apart from exchanges.
