Meeting notes: Governance, Aug 15 2018

Governance
1

Meeting notes

Governance meeting held Aug 15 @ 4PM UTC in grin/Lobby on Gitter, full chat transcript here.

Grin Council attendance:
@antioch
@hashmap
@igno.peverell
@jaspervdm
@lehnberg
@tromp
@quentinlesceller
@yeastplume

Agenda points & Actions

Meeting schedules

It was decided that dev-focused and governance-focused meetings will alternate from now on every Tuesday @ 3PM UTC, i.e.

  • Aug 21 @ 3PM UTC: Dev meeting
  • Aug 28 @ 3PM UTC: Governance meeting
  • Sep 4 @ 3PM UTC: Dev meeting
  • etc.

Actions:

  • [ ] @ignopeverell to notify mailing list of new meeting times?

Naming

The group decided to refer to themselves as “Grin Council”, intentionally keeping the name short, simple, and descriptive, with no branding.

Regarding risk management

As a follow up from last meeting, document on risk management is on the wiki, now with some draft suggestions for responses and principles.

Actions:

  • [ ] Grin Council members to review in detail and comment.
  • [X] @lehnberg to add additional Risks re intentional & accidental forks.

Donation address

A BTC address is to be set up to receive donations. It was agreed that this would be a 3 out of 5 multi-sig, controlled by Grin Council members, without disclosing who those are. All decisions are still taken by the entire council.

Actions:

  • [X] Grin council members to elect the 5 signature holders.
  • [ ] @ignopeverell to set up wallet and make it official.

Mining, consensus algorithm, and ASICs

It’s expected that there will be ASIC mining on the coin within the first six months of mainnet, possibly as early as within the first three months. What is Grin’s position regarding this?

This was a general discussion to gauge participant thinking and to get a conversation going. Some of the scenarios discussed:

  • Doing nothing, keeping the original “pure” Cuckoo.
  • Running a gradually modified “dirty” Cuckoo that makes lean mining infeasible. The modifications ease over time, gradually containing the incentives.
  • Running dual PoW schemes, where one of the schemes is “pure” Cuckoo to encourage mining, and the other is a more GPU friendly algorithm, like ProgPOW .
  • Using a different PoW algorithm than Cuckoo.

A couple of more general points were also discussed:

  • At time of launch, consensus will be done as PoW. There is other promising tech such as proof-of-stake or proof-of-capacity, but it is not mature enough.
  • Trying to rush to market comes with security trade-offs, and should be avoided.
  • Building community ASICs does not necessarily protect the coin, as there are formidable opponents in the space that are well financed and are expected to be better.

To be continued in next meeting.

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Because I wasn’t at this week’s powow to discuss at the time, and though it turns me into worst kind of bike shedder, I think COUNCIL sounds elitist (though at the end of the day it really isn’t a particularly charged word, only compared to alternatives) and to @lehnberg 's points calling it a council of wizards or whatever I think explicilty makes it sound LESS cool and more nerdy and humble. When a hard decision has to be made do we want to read “THE COUNCIL made the contentious decision to alter the policy…” or “The Knights of the Grin Table/etc made the contentious decision to alter the policy…” one I think immediately disarms while the other does nothing to quash fear/anger/paranoic thinking, which I think we all know can be common in cryptography related fields and particularly cryptocurrencies. Maybe i’m the one overthinking. My background is linguistics/behavior so I am truly not trying to waste time but to think strategically and do something other coins haven’t been able to do to this extent.

Imagine if something called DOGECOIN was used to topple fascist regimes, it would sound like a joke and fly under the radar while doing its job . And to the note on media latching on to the names, that is EXACTLY what we want. Sincere and knowledgable parties will not be phased by the names/discussion of the names, and others will see “GRIN, governed by a Convocation of Wisened Old Mages, was used to buy meth on the dark web,” and, I think, stumble going to grab their pitchforks.

I am far from a Harry Potter fanboy, and I think the impressive computer science being done entirely negates anything bad that could come from incidental fan-boy misunderstandings. I also don’t think anybody worth worrying about is going to learn about grin and think that it’s harry potter theme is what makes it valuable.

Of course we should always steer clear of copyrights, etc, but something like Ministry of Mages or Coven of Alchemical Liason Maintainance (CALM) or The Spontaneous Order of Unknown Leaders (SOUL, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_order#Markets) , Confederacy of Watchmakers (COW again), The Stygmergic Syzygy (The SS? I’m sure someone will call someone a nazi someday? oof) Institute of Broom and Wand Design, P.O.W.O.W. (which could stand for The POWOW Order of Wizards Ongoing Work… which has that nice nested GNU thing… and actually we’ve already been calling it the powow… plus the connotations for proof of work, POW, and pain, OW… but is probably incensitive to native americans), at the very least instead of Grin Council the Council of Grin (jesus at this point I really am starting to just sound totally worthless), aka the CoGs decided… even things that are subtler like a Sobornost (“the combination of freedom and unity of many persons on the basis of their common love for the same absolute values.”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sobornost) or Synod (church council) a Conventicle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventicle) a Conciliabulum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conciliabulum) which at least sound kind of harry potter.

Gild of Overly Beurocratic Leadership, Integration, Negotiation and Science aka GOBLINS. WWMKBN (We who must not be named or wizards and witches mimblewimbling knowledgably beneath notice)… I really like picking a acronym or initialism that means something different every time as @igno.peverell said.

I just think its a rare opportunity to do something important and also essentially without rules… branding and propaganda is so all-prevalent today it would be a shame not to take advantage of an opportunity for culture-jamming (a la adbusters et al), and not to both maintain the already cool naming conventions and make a really light-hearted nomenclature. There will be plenty of generically named mimblewimble coins in the future, why curb the extant quirkiness suddenly? It really is a shroud of misdiretion that is exactly what an important privacy project needs. The project is technically very good, so we could name it the POOP coin and it would still be deserving of respect. Given that it doesn’t matter I would prefer something fun and magical. A constant reminder not to take one’s self too seriously is about the most powerful antidote to evil there is.

If it’s at all palatable I will think of better ones before next meeting and maybe its worth talking about again. If not, it really doesn’t matter.

I also think we should continue to think about the evolving pure/dirty algo, seems like it solves a lot.

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