A lot has been happening this year 2023 and I wanted to let everyone know GRIN is here and its looking forward to next year 2024. 
Be kind to each other and productive in criticism.
Please share your GRIN moments of 2023 here and at the same time ask GRIN to do more in 2024: 
Personally I am following along and helping in the background when ever I am needed. I was not as active as I used to be in the past, but rest asure I am still here.
→ MCM-Mike
I was able to get involved and help out the community with test mining so I’m grateful that I was able to give back. 
– I hope I can get involved in other ways in the coming New Year too!
Also expanded my Grin mining farm from 8 to 12 minis, so I’m pretty happy about that too.
2023 was a busy year for Grin governance and for me. I helped the Community Council deal with @davidtavarez and @hendi stepping down, @Mokhtar making @Cobragrin his representative in the Council and luckily we could welcome @trab and @Trinitron as new council members.
Appart from dealing with changes in governance, I shifted some of my time to learning Rust using the Rust book 
and I played more with grin-wallet than in any of the previous years.
I hope in 2024 to spend more of my time developing my technical skills since I enjoy doing so and hopefully finish my first own little Rust project (not Grin related, but good practice). I wish you all a Merry Christmas’s and a happy new year with a lot of Grinning 
.
2023 came with the biggest opportunity for me to start programming on Rust for Grin and gave the best chance to build a product with focus on usability and availability on top of it that I enjoy to use by myself by taking all experience from previous projects/years.
Thanks to Grin for his protocol elegance and minimalism, its very attractive and gives a feeling to be ahead of everything what we have in cryptocurrency field at same time and of course to people around I had a chance to communicate/work with: @tromp @Yeastplume @Cobragrin @Anynomous @oryhp @vegycslol
Next year will come with new hot releases and will be another next step to make Grin available for everyone and everywhere. Grin is not dead while we all are here =)
I apologize before hand if anyone feels offended by this Christmass grin meme 
, just having fun, hohoho, merry Christmas everyone
Happy New Year. I’m still grinning!
It’s almost 5 years. Should we initialize the new node challenge contest for mainnet anniversary date 15.01.2019? I could donate some for the contest.
I did also think about this idea, but I am unsure as the preparation takes some time so our backend works again properly like the last time.
But, the main reason I did not quicker proceed with this is, connecting all GRIN nodes to Grinnode.live is the goal of the Node-Challenge, but at the same time centralizes all connections to Grinnode.live.
Therefore I did not do the challenge again.
Let me think about this a bit more or share your ideas with us.
@mcm-mike I share your concern of centralization. Perhaps we should tweak the concept. E.g. have some random nodes that people do not specifically connect to register all nodes that are connecting to them with less focus on absolute up time. E.g. if a node is seen at least X days by a node it is part of a lottery where it can win prices. This more fair to those with less stable internet connections or PCs and laptops that might not be online at night to still have a chance to win something.
These are just some innitial thoughts, we can discuss it in more detail
Timing wise, perhaps it would be nice to combine it with the release of Grin-GUI, to insentivise people to update their nodes and perhaps give grin GUI a try.
Grin’s mainnet celebrates its fifth anniversary on the 15th of this month. Are there any community events planned for this milestone?
@mwgrin07 Not yet, but it is a good question/suggestion. Perhaps make into a seperate forum topic so we can discuss it further.
I’m not really good at technical side, I’m just thinking about creating a forum page and people can put their own IP addresses that running Grin node. At the time of withrawing the winners, we just check the standard grin node port are running or not and choose IP randomly by some random tools.
