“A Horcrux is an object used to store part of a person’s soul, protecting him or her from death. If the body of a Horcrux owner is killed, that portion of the soul that had remained in the body does not pass on to the next world, but will rather exist in a non-corporeal form capable of being resurrected by another wizard.”
I’ve seen a lot of interest on proposals to create a Grin’s book ([1], [2], including myself [3]), therefore, I propose to build the first Grin’s Horcrux: a well written and comprhensible book on all what matters for Grin, made by the community, for everyone.
WHY
I feel like that sometimes an idea could be more powerful than all the tecnologies combined.
Building together a book could be useful in different ways. At one hand, it would strenghten the community through the process of learning by doing and engagement. At the other hand, it would align the point of view of people and I think that there is nothing stronger than a lot of people agreeing and sharing a common view. It would also help newcomers to approach the Grin’s world, letting them know what we are talking about, while, at the same time, allowing to reduce the existing asymmetry of information (one of the causes of economic inequality into the economy). It would give some standards, which in turn, could help to build solid ideological basis and could help give a direction to the community.
Information is one of the keys. Information enrich everyone.
HOW
The process of building it could be more or less the same as we have seen so far. There is a backbone which represent the main open source branch and there are proposals of improvements for the variuos sections of the book.
I suggest to use the R language and the R ide to make it, and that is for several reasons:
- It has nice packages to do exactly that. It can be possible to write a book with the bookdown package, or to build a flexible website with the blogdown package (and HuGo, that uses static contents that seem to be faster).
- It’s open source.
- It would be easier to manage and order chapters, as long as it uses markdown (or Rmarkdown).
- It could be easier to check and make improvements that could be made on github.
- It is possible to add shiny apps to create meaningful statistics for the community. We can make an interactive book, gathering data for real use cases.
- The R language is mainly focused on statistical research, so it is suitable for documenting and for reproducting results.
- I have just started to make it in R and blogdown
The idea is to have a book (or site) with good and readable content, in a sort of summary of the thoughts of the great thinkers that are in line with what would be the Grin’s philosophy. It should be entirely open source so that it can be easily copied and reproduced. Moreover, sources should always be listed in a bibliography and the content should be somehow agreed within the community.
The book should not be too long to discourage reading and shouldn’t be repetetive. Concepts should be clear and simple, which doesn’t mean that one hasn’t to read the book twice or more.
Chapters should be ordered in a meanaingful way, so as to lead the reader to understand, chapter after chapter, why Grin is important. The first chapters will be those that will hardly be changed, while continuing towards the next chapters, the content will be more dynamic.
Everyone could (should) partecipate, however, we have to pay attention to offer the best quality possible.
WHAT
Have you ever had an enligthening moment while reading a book? The Grin’s book is intended to be a summary of all that moments.
Sometimes reading completely changes your point of view. The biggest effects are when multiple “eureka moments” make you connect the dots. Then, the magic happens when dots are connected through the more heterogeneus people and fields.
Of course, all of this can be subjective, but aligning thoughts could help reach a strong consensus earlier.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve just started to make some content, however I’m aware that my work it’s still a long way from what I’ve been saying so far. There is a lot more to do, probably more than what a single person can do. But that’s where communities shine!
Most of the content I’ve done is part of my journey in discovering what is money. I took inspiration from the Austrian school of economics (for example Rothbard, Hayek, Menger, Schumpeter, and I’m currently reading Huerta de Soto).
These are the chapters that I’ve thought for now. Feel free to propose chapters, content or resources.
Part I: Economics
- Introduction to economics: an introduction to economics, explaining the basics and fundamental laws of the economic machinery.
- Money and society: the basic contract role of money in society in a general way.
- The history of money and banking: starting from ancient societies, to the more recent monetary systems (also to understand in which phase of history we are).
- The characteristics of money: the basics characteristics of money and their differences.
- The economic thought: to discover the roots of economics.
Part II: Technology
- Technological change: this part is focused on the main innovations that have changed history and how they have consequently changed the human behavior.
- The history of cryptocurrencies: the history of crypto starting from the cypherpunk movement to the release of the white paper.
- Cryptographic primitives: an introduction to cryptographic primitives to understand the building blocks of the blockchain.
- Bitcoin and the Nakamoto consensus: bitcoin explained, the mechanism, the monetary policy, the trilemma, ecc.
404 not found. From here on I havn’t done anything yet, for now it’s just an idea.
Part III: Grin
- The history of Grin & Mimblewimble
- The Grin’s principles
- The magic technology behind Grin
- Grinomics
- Grin consensus
- Monetary policy
- Governance
- Development
- Statistics
- Nodes
- Community members
- Markets
Part VI: Grin wizards
- Money management
- Security
- Privacy
- Small and medium enterprises
- Projects
- Roadmap
I would put the site on Github as soon as I can better fix the contents, however, it would take some time (and encouragement).
We could add things or elaborate on the way, when we find meaningful resources.
I have more in mind than what I am able to explain.
Nobody knows what would be Grin in 5 years. Just know that every action is important, and it could change history 
.
I am Ignotus.
