The question is probably had one.
I like for the four things: minimalistic design, little on-chan bloat, transaction uniformity and linear emission. The linear emission is the most important here IMO. There is already a project which claims to have even thinner blockchain: Coda Protocol. Anyway, tech can be implemented and ported to any existing blockchains. Scallability, privacy, uniformity and bloat will be solved with all that zero-knowledge stuff. Linear emission is not easy to re-implement. Currently many people think that linear emission in Grin is not a good part and want to see limited supply. But if or when after a few years with lower inflation linear emission becomes to an advantage and someone wants to copy it in their cryptocurrency, they will be need to go through all the high inflationary years. SCAMs won’t do it and legit commercialized projects too.
But with that I’m against Proof-of-Work. Maybe not for now but for the more distant perspective. I know Proof-of-Stake is not popular option here and some people are here from the Bitcoin community where PoS is very unpopular too. Also PoS is incompatible with the high emission rate of Grin. PoS is very suitable for fixed supply coins with low emission rate. Ethereum even prepare their EIP-1559 to make staking rewards more predictable and limited. And Bitcoin has low emission now and can be switched to PoS.
Many people from Bitcoin community are strictly against PoS. But if it becomes more clear that PoW harms adoption they can change their opinions. A lot of conscious people don’t want to hear anything about cryptocurrencies because of mining. The crowd are mostly uninformed about alternative consensus schemes. Many people who didn’t use cryptocurrencies thinks that they all require mining. Some tried to inform themselves but they read all that anti-PoS articles. But this will change with enough of time. People who don’t want mining will go into PoS chains. And when Bitcoin starts to lose market dominance because of that PoS can be implemented in Bitcoin.
When the two biggest blockchain switched to PoS it will affect the entire crypto-market. Many other projects will also be switched to PoS. What is a possible “Plan B” for Grin in that case? Which alternative distribution schemes are compatible with the Grin emission model and also still fair and simple. Any thoughts?