Let's talk about the elephant in the room

Definitely, that’s it.

Just some of my random dabblings

Utility/usability really is the key to success. Unless something happens to Bitcoin, it has successfully established itself as the ultimate store of value on the digital currency space, bar none. Network effect has been established and any other protocols that tries to disestablish or vie against bitcoin will get demolished tbh.

In using crypto as a medium of exchange, there needs to be a reason to use such a currency instead of fiat/stablecoin. And in the digital market where fiat on ramp is difficult, countries where censorship is prevalent, ect, having anonymous/private centric protocol i think.

I think grin is in good spot, as long as we can put it into USE. Although it is inflationary, i do think it does carry store of value properties as well.

I am overall optimistic, very optimistic.

Yes, recent months might be retroactively viewed as Grin’s “dark days”. Despite some awesome innovations (TOR!), the project lost it’s way and became very expensive hobby of selected few, who are getting lots of money every month. Regular users were almost forgotten, voices outside of small group of centralised people were not heard. The cypherpunk vibe was lost - group of people voting every couple of months to give themselves insane amount of money is not very cypherpunkish, no matter how good the coding is. Both Grin and Beam devs have no stake in project’s success - they are paying themselves lots of money no matter the results (Grin from their funds, Beam from treasury). And despite all of that, in terms of quality, Grin was overtaken by Beam and more people are excited about Beam now, despite it performing worse on the markets, so it is no longer about the price.

But many posts recently (both here and on Discord) show that people seem to realise the mistakes were made and if that trend continues and we get back on track, remind ourselves what was important, this whole thing might turn around instantly. People who are looking for the ecosystem will be happy, because more people will join to build it, regular users will be happy because finally we will get useful GUI wallet with great UI and easy tx, traders will be happy because only then serious exchanges will start to list the project, cypherpunx will be happy, because finally the innovation will take off, speculators will be happy because their investment will finally start giving them profit.

Discussion like that was needed. And good that finally something is being done about it. Go back to the roots guys, think about what made you interested in all this. It was not about huge checks, it was about bringing something great to the world, and I believe with that new attitude we will finally see the results!

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Well said Pollenz. Agree wholeheartedly that there needs to be simple UI /broader usability and engagement with others beside deep tech folks or otherwise the project is nothing more than a “very expensive hobby” for a tiny number of people and is ultimately going nowhere. Why? Because by the time the current funds are used up most people who were likely to donate the sorts of sums collected heretofore will have left the building. With loss of wider engagement, miners will give up running nodes - already becoming a problem - and so their contributions to central funds will also dry up. The upshot will be that there will be no $10k per month x 3 or 4, to pay experienced dev.s indefinitely. Current funds might last 2 years at the current run rate so the project will essentially run out of money and the paid dev.s will then leave and the project will be consigned to the history books, cypherpunk and otherwise. Two years is not a lot of runway so remedial action needs to be taken now.

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What is the most successful (in terms of both tech and price appreciation) coin apart from bitcoin? That would be ETH.

But many people do not know that despite interesting tech (first turing-complete decentralised programs) and long term preparations (started in 2013, funding was in 2014, launch in 2015) it didn’t lift off initially. Devs were doing their best to create interesting product, people were mining but the price was going down and interest was lackluster. It was not until THIS happened.

Yeah, someone, probably one of the big investors or even cofounders, there was lots of debates about that, anyway, someone who had stake in the whole project started sending automated messages to members of r/Bitcoin and other notable crypto-related subreddits. The spam was happening every couple of days, explaining in simple words, why Ethereum is worth checking out. Yeah, Reddit spam was something that made Ethereum succeed (of course it would not succeed without interesting tech, but most people didn’t even know about that tech). Perhaps Grin is now in similar situation.

After the infamous Reddit spam happened, ETH started getting popular, more people started to mine, invest and build the ecosystem. Not saying that we should spam Reddit (but I wont’ stop anyone from doing this), however my point is, that having influential fan with big financial stake in the project and ways to spread the word is necessary for the project tu succed, because many good projects fell to obscurity because failed to become well known and easy to use (To name some of them: check Namecoin from early days).

Was spamming Reddit by wealthy Ethereum influencer a noble tactic? Perhaps not.
Did it give results? Yeah, and they were good for both the ecosystem and price. More people started coding, more people started mining, more people started buying.
And people who acted upon that spam never regretted.

Do we have influencer with big stake in the project onboard and does he know, how to make the good tech widely known?

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great source of info about ethereum reddit subspamming

That is why we really need to take over the GRIN twitter account @grinmw and put some fire there. some real and good fire. by people that are good at twitting.

15,000 subscribers.

There is a recent discussion here :

So to me. No RFC for that, no governance meeting.
GRIN is a coin, and some important decisions and actions have to be outside of the council if we want this community to grow a bit and feel itself more involved.

Just give the keys to the appropriate community member and release the horses to make people know about this coin and its news and interact in a nice way.

Nobody in the council except Daniel has reacted on this…
Would be great to have a sign and the opinion of the account owner and that we dont waste 6 months to move forward with that.

Hopefully he hasn’t pulled an “Ignotus” and will come back to provide his perspective.
this account needs to be well used for the good of Grin and the community

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@0xtardigrade The only thing I’m worried about is community members calling Grin a ‘product’, looking up to the core contributors as executives.
This is exactly how Grin’s path as an open-source project may reach a dead end. This kind of thinking breeds rent seeking instead of passion and enthusiasm in light of future possibilities, all entirely possible through community effort.

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Whether core members are the executive or not is not the most relevant question.

Maybe what is a more relevant question is how core is perceived by community members and lurkers ?
Core members have never said that everything has to go through their approvals, but fact is up to now most of the things go through their approvals.

So I guess we should all brainstorm to how ae could change things so that the community feels more involved and empowered

It is very simple. Make Grin such that it is easy to use for users, exchanges and darknet markets. That is all.

Many exchanges including Bisq stopped supporting Grin because it is unusable.
The only place where there is real adoption of Cryptocurrency are darknet markets. Make it easy for them to use Grin.

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What would be the steps to make grin easier to use ?
there are several ideas that could be implemented:

  • hire ux/gui designer and do an official wallet like other coins do, with the most slick interface as possible. prioritize this the most and start asap.
  • make some tx methods legacy (https and http typically, maybe even grinbox). also asap, at the risk of brutalizing exchanges, especially the ones that have listed grin and that do not have a lot of resources.
  • implement David’s non interactive tx (see Litecoin LIP for more details on what it is)

Maybe there are other ideas as well, in which case would be curious to hear :slight_smile:

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This! Less talking about who siphons more money from the funds (very cypherpunky, as was mentioned above) more of good ideas like what Kurt stated above. I really hope things will change now and the team will start to think more about the project. Literally, what is stoping us now from implementing the above? If there are no people who can do this in the team, let’s hire them. Hire Ux designer, build official wallet, standarize the way to send coins, make the coin easy to use. Start with what is really necessary, then go to the fancy stuff. Unless this is all about extending the work for as long as possible to siphon as much money out as possible and then abandon the project, which I really hope is not the case. Yes, some mistakes were made along the way. Now it is time to make Grin what it is supposed to be and not just money making machine for the centralised group of few, which is way worse than Beam’s tax. As I said before, I am optimistic now. The community finally spoke.

Some people are already thinking through some interesting ideas on UX improvements on keybase so you might want to check there as well. I think the paid devs should work on the protocol code (they have this skillset and it’s probably the best use of money) and make it stable so that we reach something that can run for decades if needed - apart from quantum computers drama in case we reach that.

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good protocol engineers are rare. grin happens to have a few of them. most crypto projects dont even have one. i encourage them to continue working on the base protocol.

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The fact that the acceptance of these projects are exponentially growing is simply an assumption. Grin may be dead in 10 years or maybe its defining blockchain and protocol will shine compared to the others. While the outlook of Grin may be little in your mind, now is the perfect time to join a project like this. Maybe you should help contribute to making it more desirable for the average user. Out of all mineable cryptocurrencies, Grins market cap is 38th. If you look at the 24hr volume, it is 16th on the list at 33mil. That is not bad for a currency developed by the open-source contribution that is just over a year old. Many of the cryptocurrencies started out with an okay protocol and they have continuously been patched to achieve their desire. This makes many of their blockchain’s full of legacy data that is not able to be trimmed. Grin stands out in this arena. While it will continue to be improved upon the maturity of the protocol from the beginning is years ahead of the others.

I stated a cryptocurrency is not meant for an average user, which can be highly debated. But what government would allow for this. And why would an average user accept crypto as their primary exchange when governmental currency is insured and accepted everywhere. The point of cryptocurrency is freedom from governmental control. This freedom has to be explicitly sought out by the user for their own purpose. China is a perfect example of governmental control and banning bitcoin. Crypto to me will always be underground for those who seek the freedom that has never been achieved in the past. The history of open source technology is a great example of this.

A good bet website 100% Grin friendly would increase the adoption by providing a new and constant use case…

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Interesting discussion, I like elephants :elephant:. Wanted to add a couple of things, opinions are my own, my filters are turned off, here we go:

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In case you missed it, I referenced this thread in Tuesday’s governance meeting: https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin-pm/blob/master/notes/20200324-meeting-governance.md#66-teams:

I just wanted to point out that suggestions and ideas like these are welcomed. There’s a dormant @grincoin.teams.community. If people have ideas for a fund or ambassador program, put it in an RFC, write a budget and a funding request, and let’s discuss in detail. Your chances for funding being approved will improve if you are not completely new around here and if you have some kind of positive track record of contributions to the project.

If you’re new and still want to propose something, you might also want to start making contributions and get to know others here. That’s how it worked for all of us. :slight_smile:

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Generally speaking, any proposal that’s well argued, shows reason, follows logic, is full circled and is argued in good faith, seeking to discover some constructive improvement rather than trying to be right for the sake of being right or for the sake of inflating your own ego, I think will be at least considered. Even if people may not agree or draw the same conclusions as you. So if you have something to propose, nobody is stopping you. And there’s no shame in trying and failing!

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The general fund being detached from Grin price fluctuation I think is a feature, not a bug. Especially given the emission rate the first years of mainnet, it would have been very difficult to fight the tide of the percentual increases to the supply. :slight_smile: Look around at other projects, living and dying with the price of their coin. You end up being very short sighted, doing what you can right now to move the price, rather than focusing on stuff that makes sense in the longer term.

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If you think devs are being “insanely” overpaid, get involved when they ask for money. Make a convincing case for why they are asking for too much. Deduct operating costs, taxes, health insurance, pension contributions, etc and present your case for what a fair rate is instead. Keep in mind that each individual submits their own request. In fact, there was one funding request that launched today, so here’s your chance! Request for funding / Antioch / Apr-Jun 2020

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So far, people who’ve been funded are Ignotus, Yeastplume, Jasper, and myself. They were all contributing without compensation for a long time (years) before asking for money (not sure about yeastplume). Antioch who’s now asking for money (see previous point) submitted their first PR to Grin in 2017. And me, I’m not sure but I think I was contributing 9-10 months before making my initial request. I’m sorry to disappoint but - none of us joined the project in order to get rich quick.

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In fact, we never expected to receive such a windfall in the fund in the first place. We set up a mu-sig wallet, and we received very generous donations to it. It was unexpected, but it was most certainly welcomed. The large donor(s) understood who had control of the funds. “Keep doing what you’re doing” was the message. I for one intend to do just that, advocating for spending in the way I think best helps the protocol over the long term.

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At some point though, the funding will run out, and donations will dry up. It’s okay. The project was literally broke and launched one of the most anticipated blockchains with $0 spent on protocol development. (Aside from three or so yeast funding rounds that he managed himself.) Unlike other projects, I think Grin will do just fine without any funding, we never even expected to have funding in the first place. This makes us resilient. I can think of many reasons why I would decide to leave the project, but running out of money is not one of those.

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Even if you’re not a dev, and don’t have a brilliant idea you want to ask for money for, we can still use your help. We’re looking for community managers / moderators, testers, technical writers, wiki wizards, and individuals with good vibes in general that are excited about the tech and the promise of Grin. Hit me up if you want to toss ideas, my DMs are open.

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If you’re not a dev, don’t have idea for how to spend money, don’t want to contribute, and don’t have any good vibes to offer either… Bummer. Make sure you stick around in any case, you might get inspired at some point in the future!

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But! If you find that this is all quite the bullshit, that the “true spirit of grin” has been hijacked by some centralized, virtue-signalling assholes that are buying themselves golden slippers and diamond rings (it’s all about that bling bling baby :ring:) and you feel something ought to be done about this… then please do so! What is the core team anyways?

It’s some people with:

  • commit rights to the github repo
  • mu-sig access to a bitcoin wallet
  • admin rights on a discourse forum
  • admin rights on a keybase group
  • (We don’t own the domain grin.mw, it’s been kindly lent to us from 0xb100d)

Really, how hard is that to replicate? Grab a few likeminded buddies, fork the repo, setup your own forum and keybase group, and there you go! Throw in a donation btc/grin wallet for good measure and you’re off to the races. Call yourselves Grin PRO, Grin X or whatever you like. If you follow the consensus rules, your node will be treated just like any node on the network. And we’d be happy to have you. The more the merrier. You’ll be running your own show, king of your castle, master of your domain, and can do whatever you like.

Note that this is NOT me telling you to “fork off”, on the contrary I’d like you to stay. This is me telling you that you DO NOT have to accept our governance model if you don’t want to. Participation is voluntary.

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Finally, I just want to close with saying that we never expected to find ourselves a few months after mainnet having launched without Igno. Core team members were all looking to Igno for leadership, and he disappeared way too early. We’re definitely not perfect, and none of us are close to having the leadership qualities that Igno had. We’re doing our best, trying to learn from mistakes, and are hoping to improve over time.


Thanks for reading all the way, keep on keeping on in these times! :pray:

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  1. I would be more then willing to contribute. I am no developer but i do work in IT so am somewhat technical. Something like testing would def be my forte.

Yay, we’d love to have your help! :metal:

See here QA Team by j01tz · Pull Request #45 · mimblewimble/grin-rfcs · GitHub for some current thoughts about a QA team, there are some unanswered thoughts and questions in the PR conversation, feel free to chip in if you like.

This is disingenuous. You yourself told me the act of creating Grin++ was adversarial in its nature, and claimed that I was wrong to do so. This is just more virtue signaling.

The community has been speaking but the centralized core makes their dealings in an echo chamber

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