Hello there. Here’s where I’ll share my weekly progress to those interested.
B E G I N
Quickstart guide - A short and basic tutorial to get grin node and grin-wallet up and running, initialize, and learn the to send & receive. quentin initially wrote the first half and my work was to polish it and then write the second half.
Wallet user guide - A very comprehensive user guide to grin-wallet. Based on an the outdated document yeastplume wrote. Rewrote and revamped a lot of it and updated to v4.0.0.
Story - Tells the history of the project. This is the 1st part of a series of documents under the category About Grin, which is meant to serve as a somewhat deep yet friendly introduction to Grin, something severely missing at the moment. Would love some input on the Story doc, having a hard time deciding how I want to finish it.
Privacy - A new primer on privacy. 2nd part of About Grin.
Scalability (WIP) - A new primer on scalability. 3rd part of About Grin.
There is plenty of research, resource gathering done and reading being done, as I’m no expert at everything, yet it all needs to be perfectly accurate. I’m Trying to make it flawless.
Also set up the ground with a rough outline for a new Introduction to Mimblewimble and looking forward to writing it down next week, will take quite some time.
Do we know who manages the snap binary? In general, it’s not a great idea to suggest installing from package managers unless the repo is maintained by well-trusted member(s) of the community, and even then, downloading from github and checking sigs should still be the recommendation.
Yes it’s in fact @quentinlesceller who manages it. But I see your point, I think for now I’ll mark it as an alternative method along with a warning, and later on maybe remove it entirely, depending on additional input.
Got it! It didn’t used to be Quentin. Maybe just a small alert that suggests checking the signature against the github repo would be good. Just as long as they know it’s not a deterministic build, and some trust is required.
I have set out to create a new technical introduction to Mimblewimble. The current one assumes prior knowledge of cryptography which sets an unwanted barrier to learning. Mimblewimble initially seems very intimidating to most, but it’s actually quite elegant and not too complicated once you understand the principles behind it. Basically, I created the introduction I wish I had when I first learned how the protocol works (not long ago).
Elliptic Curve Cryptography - 1st part of Introduction to Mimblewimble series. Describes the basics of ECC and curve operations.
Commitments - 2nd part of Introduction to Mimblewimble series. Briefly goes over the concept of commitments, and pedersen commitments specifically, in an easy to understand way.
Mimblewimble - 3rd part of Introduction to Mimblewimble series. This is a polished and partially rewritten version of the current introduction. This was pretty ambitious of me, I hope I did well.
Emission - Introduces emission schedule and reviews the various considerations behind it (security & distribution). 4th part of About Grin.
Transactions - Presents an overview of the transaction flow and how the wallet handles it, from a user’s perspective. 5th part of About Grin.
I’ve asked for feedback on the new series but haven’t gotten much yet. Anybody willing to read and criticize would be most welcome!
The plan for next week is to finish the last two parts of About Grin series, then begin looking at some PRs and RFCs for improving upon documentation of implementation details. But I need to look into it and see how far I’m able to go with this, and what exactly is needed.
I really encourage you to contact me with suggestions, and to help me decide what I’m going to work on next.
After 8 years: Bitcoin: x + x/2 = 3x/2. Grin: x + x = 2x.
3x/2 = 3/4.2x, so: “So compared to a constant supply, after 8 years, the total amount of coins emitted is only 33% less.” is wrong. You can replace 33% by 25%. ; )
Ah, the first person was right then : )
1.5 = 2 - (1/4).2
2 = 1.5 + (1/3).(1.5)
Otherwise, I read the part on elliptic curve, it is not bad. You aquired a good understanding. i’ll send you some improvements on that part when i can find the time.
In the meantime the following video is nice to watch for the elliptic-curve curious:
Slatepack Integration Guide - Document introducing the Slatepack standard to services (mostly exchanges) and outlining how to integrate it.
Credit to @joltz for the great feedback.
Wiki - Technical documents finally transferred from grin repo. A few required editing, merging and formatting.
Proof of Work - Short overview of our PoW and the decision around being ASIC friendly. Our PoW has quite gone through quite a long process so it was challenging to keep it all relatively short. This doc will definitely need a re-visit sometime. 6th part of About Grin.
Went through all current wiki documents and made a list of those worth keeping. The rest can safely be discarded to reduce clutter.
I spent a lot of time discussing about grin lately. I often end up being very obsessive over one specific thing. Now trying to reclaim my other hobbies (not that anybody cares).
Anyway, If there’s anything else you want to see in the new docs, I wanna hear it!
If you have the time in the coming weeks to spend a bit on it, I would love to see some 5/10/15-line portraits of the historical contributors to Grin. This brings some subjectivity to who to put and to not put (people could always add portraits after), but at the end of the day it is OK, and historical contributors who are not present could always complain to us to be added : )
This would ideally mostly be focused on technical contributions, and for the non-anonymous contrubutors, maybe 2 or 3 lines on their backgrounds. This work would require to dig into Github and maybe Gitter logs quite a bit, but that could be interesting to start such a project, which does not need to be finished any time soon.
Otherwise, keep up the good work, very valuable for Grin to have all these new and updated docs
Hi everybody. As a final update i’d like to inform you all that docs.grin.mw is now up. I’ve discontinued my funding request so as to not receive payment for the 3rd month, as my work is finished.
I will continue to maintain and expand the documentation in my free time over the next years. I was even granted commit access to the docs repo, which makes this much more convenient.
Amazing you managed to achieve all that in just 2 months! And thank you for the documentation, they helped me and are still helping me to dive deeper in the Grin rabbit hole. I think this documentation will help others as well in the future to go from enthusiastic lurker to building understanding needed to go towards becoming a contributing community member.
congrats and thank you!
