Let's talk about the elephant in the room

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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I agree. They’ve turned a blind eye to the community they’re supposed to represent.

Many people in this thread have rightly recognized that Grin is not the cypherpunk-driven coin it once was. It’s all about politics, power, and collecting salaries. I hope we’re resilient enough to recover someday.

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This is a joke. You don’t take proposals or suggestions from the community seriously. The core is the only voice.

#4 you guys are taking in $440k (66 BTC) which is roughly half of the fund at current price… I also called out your nonsense funding proposal when you pretended you were unaware of any difference in the exchange rate of GBP and USD. That lie led to another grin core member becoming verbally abusive. Do you guys get off on this two faced virtue signaling or what?

#6 look up all the places you guys mentioned to pay yourselves with the fund, it’s on here…
$50k (just an example) feature bounties would be more productive than spending half the funds and getting relative kernels and possibly a sensible IBD mechanism can’t be what you honestly believe will help the protocol for the long term

#7 grin is bleeding developers and community members. You guys have done a horrible job maintaining the community and getting trust from the community

#8 you guys provide little help or feedback to community members (beta testers). Vast majority of comments are entirely ignored and you are all woefully absent from most community mediums

#10 you finally heard us?

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Since David seems to be very active person in the community, has lots of ideas, wants to implement them, wouldn’t it be good if he becomes part of the core team? Yeah, I know he is involved with Litecoin, but it just shows how Grin lost opportunity by not grabbing him first. I would like to encourage him to opt for becoming member of the team.

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Let’s see what the GRiN community wants. Should David Burkett (creator of Grin++ wallet) be part of the Grin core team? Vote here: https://www.strawpoll.me/19637251

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Speaking for myself, I never considered Grin++ adversarial in nature, but rather a welcome enrichment of the Grin ecosystem.

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I have been a silent observer of the project for over 2 years. This is my first reply in any forum, but I feel compelled to support David Burkett as I believe he should be added to the core team. It’s the first of many steps needed to strengthen the community and improve governance.

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For me it’s about making Grin fulfill its promise of a highly capable blockchain that is beautiful in its simplicity. I tend to oppose proposals that in my view unnecessarily complicate the protocol. NOT because they’re proposed by the community.

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I agree with the simplicity and the beautifulness, but in my thinking it is really important that we dont get blinded by it.

In physics, Einstein general relativity cannot be stated as simple per say, but it is definitely in the paradigm of reasonable mathematics, and to do the link with mimblewimble, all the people that have studied it will say that it is elegant (in a way simple by the assumptions it makes and uses - just a little insight on top of special relativity assumptions) and beautiful.

Nonetheless it is almost unused in the practical life. the only application apparently that is used today is in GPS applications, and the other uses are done in laboratories or with telescopes to confirm observations in astronomy that couldn’t be explained by Newton, and also for cosmology (theories of Big Bang etc)

Newton theory is overwhelmingly used for practical uses compared to Einstein’s. Both are elegant, both are beautiful (probably Einstein’s even more), but one of them is almost just confined in the realm of “scientific curiosity”, despite being definitely the right and best ever (more accurate) theory of gravitation

If you want to build planes or bridges only Newton is used, and if you want to predict weather and for many other things, only Newton is used too. it is used for everything

Just to say my 2 grins that we must be careful about how we consider elegance, beauty or simplicity when it is balanced with ease of use and other day to day practicalities…

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Good piece, nice to read. I think the Grin council should especially appreciate David a bit more. Despite any mutual differences. Furthermore, I am not much concerned. I see grin as a toddler who cannot even walk yet, so why do we expect him to be able to cycle already?

In addition, I think that there is also a cocktail, a toxic cocktail of macroeconomic developments that keeps cryptocurrency in its grasp. First, our own bear market is longer than we had anticipated. Second, Crypto is slowly changing to the Wild West from crooks, bad-idea money wolves, and downright fraudsters. Third, the ‘outside’ world, or in other words the people we want to bring to crypto is not at all interested at the moment. Although it was first because the traditional markets performed very well. Now it is because everyone fears for their health, job and ultimately prosperity.

Finally, I don’t worry about that either. There is a macroeconomic cycle in the price of Bitcoin or call it cryptocurrency if you like. I use that guide line and with that in mind, I sincerely believe that more than half of the poison cup is empty. We are far in that cycle. I just keep mining, especially buy BTC if the price allows it and I keep waiting quietly until I see the light at the end of the tunnel. Then Grin comes out of there like the giant, as everyone wanted to see it.

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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.

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.

It seems I wasn’t very clear, so let me expand. Whether you were being adversarial or not at the point of creation @david is subjective and completely beside the point.

I actually would have thought you of all people would get the point I was trying to make:
You created your own implementation with Grin++ and have since secured your own funding. You have quite a lot of autonomy. You have your own governance for how you accept contributions to your codebase, and manage your release schedule. You can focus and prioritise matters that you consider most important to your users. And Grin++ nodes are being treated just like any other node on the network. As long as consensus rules are followed, why would that not be the case?

You’re clearly talented, and very passionate about Grin. Of course I would have wanted to see you improve the Rust implementation. But who am I to tell you what you should be doing? (: You wanted to take Grin in directions that you were not able to build consensus for in the months leading up to mainnet launch. So I get your logic for choosing to go at it on your own, allowing you to iterate, learn, and explore much faster. Grin++ seems to be doing well as a result, it is an alternative standalone implementation that allows for different approaches to be tried, and something Grin (Rust) can draw learnings from. If something bad would happen to the Rust project, there’s a chance the C++ project would be unaffected, and vice versa.

So now that Grin++ exists, having her around adds to the network, and creates resilience and reduces centralization. The whole network is greater than the sum of its two individual implementations. And so similarly to this, if there’s anyone else that thinks the approach we’re taking with the Rust implementation is so wrong that they cannot stand by watching this happen, or simply that they want to experiment with Grin in ways that the Rust implementation cannot support for whatever reason, they are welcome to build out their own alternative. Regardless of whether that’s a fork or a separate implementation (Grin Go anyone?). I would prefer you contributing to Grin (Rust) as we could use the help, but I’d rather you do your own thing than leave altogether.

Peace out :pray:

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The claim was “we’d be happy to have you”. That was the outright lie I was pointing out. You were kind enough to take the time to explain to me that the biggest reason I was disliked by several in the core team, and the reason why they were avoiding working with me, was because I created Grin++, rather than contributing to the Rust implementation. That hardly sounds like being “happy to have” an alternative.

It doesn’t matter anymore though. It’s clear that the community recognizes that the core team, despite containing a few really great people, no longer represents it. That’s positive news, and will hopefully lead to a brighter future someday.

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Shame to see the dissension. I love this project.

Marveling at the speed of transactions and how simple everything is. I really hope these are just growing pains.

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I repeat that opinions are my own, and shouldn’t be attributed to members of the core team.

You were kind enough to take the time to explain to me that the biggest reason I was disliked by several in the core team, and the reason why they were avoiding working with me, was because I created Grin++, rather than contributing to the Rust implementation.

You’re not quoting me verbatim, instead it feels like you are putting a negative spin on what I told you in that call. I’d appreciate if you stopped putting words in my mouth. The point of the call was to mend fences with you, but it looks like it had the opposite effect. That feels like a fail on my end, and unfortunate. In any case, you’re right - it doesn’t matter anymore.

My original post above was not directed towards you, Grin++, or whatever misgivings you have with the core team. You already have your own implementation, and I’ve already expanded in depth on the degree of autonomy you have. Is there anything more to say here?

The claim was “we’d be happy to have you”. That was the outright lie I was pointing out.

Rather than agreeing or disagreeing with any of the points I raise, or making any kind of serious contribution, you’re highlighting one specific wording that you find provoking. This doesn’t feel like a discussion in good faith, more like nitpicking.

“If you choose to fork the codebase or build your own implementation, we will find a way to carry on with the project despite of this.”

Is that better?

It’s clear that the community recognizes that the core team, despite containing a few really great people, no longer represents it. That’s positive news, and will hopefully lead to a brighter future someday.

You are already well aware of this, but for the benefit of other readers: Our governance model is not democratic, nor is it based on representation. To this date, we’ve never been governed by “the will of the people”, and there’s a reason for that (but let’s save it for some other thread).

That said, the legitimacy of the governance model can always be put into question, and it is probably healthy to do so from time to time. I’m not so sure about our governance either to be honest, but I haven’t come across a better way to do it yet. I’m happy to consider constructive proposals.

In the meanwhile, those who feel this structure is illegitimate and want to do something about that can start new structures - the network will accept any alternatives that pop up, as long as clients can agree on consensus. This was the point I was trying to make.

The future is indeed bright. :pray:

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