As a bitcoin & monero supporter, and a grin beam supporter, I think marketing & UX is important - but not that most important. Devs should focus on the most vital protocol improvement and cypher algorythm.
P2P open source project is not commercial App, don’t worry too much about it.
It’s a revolution, that will make more people join in ,not just buy low and sell high.
My kind of reasoning.
I for one am wanting to do:
that’s what I’ve come up with.
What kind of ecosystem ideas do you have? I think your logic about markets/use cases/exchanges etc - all spot on, very good
For me Grin is such an inspiring project. It is impressive how the devs keep on working to create the best system possible for a fair, privacy preserving and robust decentralized digital currency despite beeing surrounded by literally thousands of Shit-Projects and several dozen of them which are for no apparent reason (much) more successful atm. Grin got the monetary policy right and the tech is super fancy. What more could one wish for? Well apparently better usability and a higher userbase. Both are achievable. Grin has a lot to offer, give it time and spread the word.
EDIT: By “devs” i explicitly include David Burkett, his work on Grin++ is awesome.
Have you tried to use bitcoin or eth? Better buy yourself a couple more hard drives LOL. On another note take a look at the history of the mentioned coins. Bitcoin took 10 years to become popular. Monero was around 5. And maybe you should analyze the price when there isn’t a pandemic!!! 
I think you’re missing the point. Crypto is not meant for your normal user… if people can’t figure out grin… maybe they shouldn’t be using crypto. If a 1GB blockchain running over Tor doesn’t intrigue you then maybe look for something that does 
While it’s true that Bitcoin took several years before reaching a first decent level of “popularity”, and while it’s true that this is similar with Monero, I don’t know if this still applies today. At the end of the day, these projects where the crypto pioneers, and because of that, well, it’s normal that it took so long for them to get some traction. But as more and more projects start to emerge, the speed of the project advancements only goes up, nearly exponentially. There is no more room for waiting 10 years before a project takes off. In 10 years, if nothing is done, well Grin will be dead, that’s how simple it is, some other private-currency-maybebasedonmimblewimble will have replaced it, thanks to a stronger ecosystem and simply more usecases.
You are telling me I’m missing the point, well, I think you are missing the point! :)) Crypto is actually meant for the normal user, otherwise, what’s the point of all of this? What’s the point of making all these cryptocurrencies, of building all these projects, if like you say so, only a handful of people will ever use them (if it’s not meant for the normal people of course).
Most people don’t even know what Tor is. Nor do they know what a blockchain is. And they don’t have to. The only thing they have to know about Grin, is that it’s an incredibly light-weight system, which is highly scalable and focused on privacy. That’s all. Unfortunately, all your technical jargon will just scare them away…
That’s the one million dollar question. If you can figure out how to build a strong ecosystem, and what services and tools should be available in this ecosystem, you essentially succeeded. Now, I think that the current number one priority, is to simplify as much as possible the gateways towards building on top of Grin. This must be as easy as possible. It must be as easy as possible to integrate Grin as a payment method, it must be as easy as possible for a developer to create a game where Grin is used, and it must be as easy as possible for a developer to create a privacy-focused lending protocol where Grin is used.
And it must be as easy to do the basic things for regular user before we move to build more sophiosticated stuff. Probably all those things that the devs are listing in their to do lists are cool and impressive stuff - I am not the one to judge this, I am not a tech person. But the thing is, we already have a cool thing here - quite anonymous and very scalable method of payment. But average crypto person (not to mention average Joe) does not know how to use it. When you brows throug various channels you can notice that people tend to keep their Grin on the exchanges, are clueless on the basic stuff. Yeah, you can say that they should go and learn, but that’s not the point. All those things in the pipeline? They might seem like starting building house from the roof immediately after you laid the foundations. Please, please, please give the community easy way to use the coin as a mean of payment before we move forward. Standarize the tx, make it easy, give people official GUI wallet (even if it is not as excellent as Beam’s). David did an excellent job, but is seems like if he moves to build MimbleWimble for Litecoin and stops developing Grin++, the project becomes totally unaccessible for regular users. Please, don’t hoard those funds that were donated, spend some of them to hire UI designer, build wallets and then figure out how Grin can be implemented in further places. I bet many exchanges would prefer to list Grin than Beam, but they can not, because they would hate their support being flooded.
I do not pretend to be the ultimate truth, but let me … If a person does not look for ways to develop, the best options for anything, you suggest leading him by the hand and so that he remains blind until the end of time? You underestimate the human nature … The nature of the discoverer, explorer conquering new heights. Instead, you argue that a person just needs to give a product and a kick in the ass
Cryptocurrency = blockchain. Blockchain = cryptocurrency
Human needs to know this, definitely needs
I’m going to ask you one question: do you know how the internet works? Like technically speaking?
I personally don’t. And I’m certain that 99.5% of the people living in this world are in the exact same situation as me. Though, the internet is currently the most used technology in the world. Weird, right?
Do you know how your bank works? I don’t. And again, 99.5% of the people in this world don’t. And they don’t need to.
Do you know how your smartphone works? I don’t, and again, guess what? 99.5% are in the exact same situation as me.
Well for crypto it’s exactly the same thing. The masses don’t care about the tech, they care about how it’s going to improve their lives. That’s the basis of marketing. What will change in my life once I start using this? This is what matters, not trying to explain them blockchains, Tor, merkle trees,… (even if it’s incredibly interesting)
agreed, exactly.
One very challenging thing is to be able to create a network and a strong base community.
the only way to get this coin take off is that people like it and trust it and that the word of mouth develops. Not that they understand how it works. indeed it is pointless.
99.5% of people will never really know why we say GRIN is scalable while some coins like ripple or BSV are also on this scalability narrative but with much higher throuputs due to centralization choices they made.
Most of the people make the ripple or BSV choice, against GRIN.
So yeah, needs to find a way to make people use grin and like it more than the susmentioned shitcoins and the others.
Only network effect can do that, nothing else, as we cant expect a lot of people to dig deeply into the tech
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!
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.
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?
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
@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.
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