Yeah I’m sure it is. But still, I feel like even a good dex will still only attract about 5 enthusiasts as long as TO’s still around. TO is easy and liquid.
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What is “TO”?
I would put a DEX in the wallet app. The biggest mistake of crypto is thinking that on/off ramps are some separate concern from transaction. They are very tightly coupled use cases.
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TO = Trade Ogre https://tradeogre.com/exchange/GRIN-BTC
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This is a typical example of what I would think of as “extra features” for non core wallet Apps. E.g a wallet with focus on privacy, Nostr integration, perhaps another wallet with focusing on ease of use with exchange integration, yet another focusing on multi platform support etc. In any case, that is up to the wallet developers themselves. I realize that as CC we should support but not so much direct the direction of third party wallets. At least that is what I got from the feedback we got so far from developers like @i1skn and @davidtavarez.
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A “core wallet” is bare bones. Basically nothing other than send and receive.
Other than that, the goal should be Venmo/Cashapp. To me, that is the baseline. Because that’s just what users expect. If we can’t match that UX, it will be perceived as sub-par
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@trab We can reopen that discussion here. I do not know much about Venmo, the key is that you integrate messaging with (micro-)payments and an address book right? Or is there more to it. I would like to know a) exactly which components you think are needed to give a Venmo style user experience, b) whether is it compatible with interactive payments?
Would Nostr be suitable? I think @davidtavarez vision for Grin++ include integration with Nostr and ideally we match our ideas/vision with the vision of existing 3rd party wallet developers like @davidtavarez and @ardocrat. Actually also @i1skn was experiment with Nostr, unfortunately he does not want to work on Ironbelly anymore 
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I think a wallet that only supported slatepacks would be more user friendly and welcoming to beginners.
The tor address only presents confusion. First it’s confusing that there is an address, since grin doesn’t need addresses, then it’s confusing that it has an online/offline state implying that a grin wallet needs to be online which isn’t true, and finally it’s confusing when you use a tor address, about whether you’re communicating the transaction over tor or just using the address to encrypt the slatepack.
I think TO was correct to look at this system and say no, we’re not using that, we’re using plain slatepacks only. If I have that correct, idk I haven’t used TO in a while, do they use a tor address for a deposit transaction? I don’t recall that they do.
And further, I think offering the option to encrypt a step 1 slatepack creates confusion about whether there’s something insecure about it. Afaik the only interesting thing revealed in an unencrypted step 1 slatepack is the amount, as long as you don’t mind revealing the amount you can post your unencrypted step 1 slatepack to a public forum.
If I had a magic wand I would remake Ironbelly without address support, just slates.
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I don’t understand the desire to use Nostr as a service for slatepack msgs communication. We have grinbox which can do the same specifically for grin, someone just need to run it, or we just want to use someone’s else infrastructure for free? But then our slatepacks can be filtered by whoever run nostr relay, so we would need to run our own relay, but that’s no difference as to run grinbox.
TO uses plain text slatepacks and that’s seems fine as it’s supposed to be shared with the exchange exclusively.
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You answered your own question. The grin network can barely run its own primary protocol. Asking this community to additionally run its own messaging protocol on top of that is just cruel and unusual.
By adopting something like Nostr (I’m open to others btw. Browse Venmo/Cashapp product planning for some research on this) we can bootstrap and run on top of an existing network.
We also get exposure to the wider Nostr user base. Anyone with a Nostr pubkey can easily use the grin wallet. You get the wallet and any other Nostr functionality at the same time when you make a keypair.
- I think you’re underestimating how many Nostr nodes exist. There are a variety of ways that they monetize their nodes as well.
- Most Nostr nodes allow for encrypted DMs. They can’t filter on what they can’t see.
- It would be much easier to spin up a grin branded Nostr relay (even to fork it and add grin payment support) than to maintain a codebase for grinbox and a fleet of grinbox nodes (Which is another thing to distract developers’ already limited time)
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I had great user experience back to the very old days with grinbox. So sad grinbox is no longer supported.
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I want to avoid any centralized component =)
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Whatever, the decisions made these years diminish the adoption of Grin rather than enlarge. I’d say the failure is mostly caused by lacking a convenient way to trade/use Grin.
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Slatepacks? Before slatepacks that was definitely true.
After slatepacks, trading grin on TO is easy. Trading grin between users is easy. Using grin is hard, because nobody really adopted it on any marketplace, but I don’t think that’s because of slatepacks. TO implemented a slatepack interface successfully and a marketplace could as well.
Grin wasn’t adopted in use as a currency imo because people doubted its value due to the constant block reward. No transfer protocol can change that.
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On topic, I think someone that wants to contribute to Grin and help it become what we all know it can be should take this
and adapt it to work with basicswapdex.
It would be good for someone to build a GRIN ↔ XMR atomic swap PoC, but that’s a lot of work.
I’ve seen it said here before, people don’t know what Grin is. Grin is space money. Regardless how you feel about it, the XMR community is carrying the torch in the space of peer to peer electronic cash, all the development is happening there and the community is holding steadfast to cypherpunk ideals better by far than any other community out there. It would be best to expand interoperability wherever they’re doing it in order to keep this experiment going and get people to really figure out what grin is.
On one of the many side topics mentioned in this thread, as far as a slatepack communication channel protocol, my philosophy is to leverage existing tools where they fit instead of building new, as long as existing tools meet all requirements and don’t impose additional overhead or create reliance on a potentially hostile party. Nostr works great and would be a fantastic choice if you wanted a standard to replace grinbox and build into clients a way to exchange signed messages. Spitballing, nostr uses schnorr signatures, and keys are encoded bech32, so it shouldn’t be an issue to translate between private key formats and have everything work without side channel coordination.
You guys (dare I say we) have the best cryptocurrency protocol out there. To be candid, it’s a shame to see it wither on the vine like it has been. I hope decisions can be made to right it’s course.
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Here is the page that shows what to do to integrate a new coin on basicswap
Because BasicSwap is an entirely cross-chain DEX, there are basic requirements that a coin must possess to be readily integrated.
The blockchain…
- Uses UTXO scripts
- Has CLTV or CSV
- Has Segwit enabled
- Works with watch-only addresses
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Basicswap uses a distributed storage network they call SMSG, which is a heavily modfiied version of the Bitmessage protocol. While its currently considered the bottleneck in scaling out the DEX, it also might be perfect for GRIN integration as it looks like it could be leveraged for transaction construction.
Unfortunately it is poorly documented, the BSX code quality draws a lot of criticism, and the Particl team behind it all has a questionable reputation to say the least. Despite this it is growing in popularity among the privacy coin communities given the number of blockchain integrations it has - afaik, it is the only way to swap XMR with LTC, for example.
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Monero doesn’t meet all those requirements.
I’m pretty sure those requirements are for them to implement the swap protocol themselves as a request. Seeing as there is already a PoC grin to btc swap (that I linked), it wouldn’t have to be built from scratch, just implemented into basicswapdex, reviewed and a PR approved. The basicswapdex team is working on this with a eth xmr atomic swap PoC already as an example.
Ultimately, things are going Monero way in the atomic swap world. There is currently not an existing grin xmr atomic swap PoC that I know of, and that’s a bit more work, but for grin to move into the world of decentralized exchange, I believe it has to happen. If I had the skillset to do it I wouldn’t waste a day. I hope both coins matter enough to someone that does because it would be a game changer for grin.
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Yeah, I believe the particl team is mainly doing this pro bono work to build liquidity for particl as well as salvage some reputation. Nevertheless, this endeavor is completely independent of the particl codebase (minus reliance on smsg nodes, still separate but they share this attribute) and so I can see no reason not to support it’s development. It is the most feature complete atomic swap client suite to date.
smsg is pretty cool…
Side note, I’ve heard talk about grin in serai… I like to avoid complex governance overhead. In a world where atomic swaps exist, schemes like Serai with a governance model and native token and such just don’t have a value add for me. Maybe if they get off the ground and there’s real liquidity that could be a draw for me, but as of right now I’m just not that excited about it.
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There is a thread on serai already. We engaged with the dev team and they kindly assessed the feasibility. It was determined that implementing Grin in Serai is impossible
By the way, the Particl marketplace solution looks amazing. It sounds like if we implement Grin in BasicSwap, we get the marketplace functionality for free!
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It’s worth noting Particl has no liquidity for many years because the dev team controls virtually the entire supply. It was 50% mined in its first two weeks, and then went proof-of-stake with 50% going to a devtax. Also there was an emission glitch a couple years ago, which its devs responded to by freezing the entire RingCT pool and requiring everyone to send outputs through a turnstile for verification, which is generally not a thing you want to do with a privacy coin.
Per salvaging reputation, BasicSwap doesn’t charge trading fees but it is designed for providing swap liquidity to the Particl Marketplace. All trades on the marketplace have to transition through the PART token due to how its escrow smartcontract works, even if the source and destination currencies don’t include PART. So calling BSX pro-bono is not exactly accurate, it’s intended to source your liquidity to be used to drive up the value of the PART token.
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