Hi everyone,
I wanted to post a quick note now that the two-week window has passed. Tromp let me know yesterday afternoon that the period was up and that I can claim the Apple M1 Ultra Cuckatoo32 miner bounty.
First, thank you. I came to Grin through the problem itself: Cuckoo/Cuckatoo, graph theory, optimization, and the practical challenge of building faster solvers while preserving correctness. That is what pulled me in. I had been working on Max-Cut solvers and related optimization problems for several years, and when I found Grin, Cuckatoo felt like a natural next step: simple to state, difficult to optimize, and meaning tied to a proof-of-work system.
The funny part is that I had never actually mined any Grin before this. I was drawn to the structure of the problem more than the mining itself. The bounty gave me a reason to take the work seriously, finish a real implementation, release it, and let others test it.
I’m grateful to Tromp for putting the bounty forward, for clarifying the requirements, and for giving the work a fair look. I’m also grateful to everyone who tested, asked questions, pushed for verification, or simply showed interest. This has been my first real attempt at turning several years of self-directed work into something useful for an open-source project, and it means a lot that it happened here.
I would also like to ask the community a follow-up question.
If the Council and the broader Grin community would be open to it, I’d like to put together a formal proposal to continue working on optimization for Grin-related systems. My interest would be in a full-time contribution path, with clear deliverables, public progress updates, and reasonable expenses for testing infrastructure or required hardware/cloud access.
I do not want to presume the right format or process, so I’m asking first: would it be appropriate for me to open a separate funding proposal or request in Governance for this kind of work?
Possible areas I’d like to explore include further Cuckatoo32 miner optimization, broader hardware targets, better benchmarking and verification tooling, and other performance-critical pieces of the Grin ecosystem where my background in graph algorithms and optimization could be useful.
Thanks again. I’m glad I found this project through the problem, and I’d like to keep contributing if the community thinks that would be valuable.