The mission statement Grin should adopt. This will guide the project’s vision strategy.
Is the vote binding?
No, the vote is non-binding. Whatever proposal wins the poll will not necessarily be the final adopted proposal.
If it’s not binding, what is the purpose?
To gauge community sentiment towards particular proposals, so that more informed decisions can be made.
How will the actual decision be made?
The vote results will guide a discussion as part of the Jan 17 governance meeting, where a decision will hopefully also be made.
How many votes do I get?
You can cast up to five (5) votes on different proposals.
Why more than one vote?
To make it indicative of community sentiment only, and to get a better sense of general direction, rather than a specific proposal, and as mitigation against the Condorcet paradox.
Do I have to use all votes
No. By using fewer votes, each vote gets a larger weight.
When are the results published?
Once the poll has closed.
Why are the results not visible until the poll has closed?
So that previous votes do not influence your vote.
Yes, once the results are published, members of the community will be able to see what proposal(s) you voted for.
Why is it not a secret ballot?
The vote is non-binding in any case and you need to join the governance meeting to argue in favour of your proposal, it makes trolls accountable, and it combats spamming and the use of fake accounts to influence vote outcome.
Where were the proposals sourced from?
From this issue, which summarises the original forum thread. The list had to be truncated down to 20 proposals as this is the maximum allowed.
How can I vote on a different proposal?
Unfortunately the poll cannot be edited. If you think you have a better suggestion, please comment in the thread below and see who “hearts” it. The vote is non-binding. You can still join the Jan 17 governance meeting and argue for your proposal.
Who decided on all this?
The attendees of the last governance meeting. The details were left to me, @lehnberg, to work out as best as I could.
The mission statement is not a tagline for the project.
It needs to be aspirational and something to work towards, rather than something that describes what Grin is right now. So less "Grin is..." and more "We're building Grin to be the..."
POLL
Grin’s mission is…
To advance economic freedom, through a privacy-focused, simple, and fair medium of exchange.
To advance financial sovereignty, through a private, simple, and accessible medium of exchange.
To be a neutral, more efficient, money technology.
To be a private, scalable, digital currency.
To be a private, trustless medium of exchange; minimal in design and inclusive of all.
To be an open community that makes sharing and exchanging value easy.
To be https:// for money.
To be the best digital cash.
To be the soundest money possible.
To build a private, scalable and open (community-initiated) currency.
To create open electronic cash for all, without censorship or restrictions.
To empower financial autonomy through a private, minimal, open medium of exchange.
To empower financial self-sovereignty, through a private, simple and open medium of exchange.
To empower freedom through an open, minimal, and private financial medium of exchange.
To fight for the freedom of your money, through privacy-focused and light-weight transactions.
To improve financial self-sovereignty through an open and lightweight medium of exchange, that protects your privacy.
To make electronic transactions possible for everyone, without censorship or restrictions.
To provide secure, private value transactions on a global scale.
To raise the standards of freedom through a lightweight, private, and simple medium of exchange.
To record the private transfer of value in a lightweight and neutral manner.
Don’t use a non-qualified “freedom”; it means different mutually exclusive things to different people “freedom of your money” is better then “economic freedom” which in turn is better then “empowering freedom” which means nothing. “Freedom of your money” necessarily means individualistic negative freedom as it has an non-specified individual as a subject; economic freedom is less concrete but it would be off if someone claimed “by removing privacy, we enable taxation which helps the economic freedom of the poor” but there are people who think that way; for “empowering freedom” I’ll leave up as an exercise to the reader to google a hitler quote about freedom
“Private” should be either alone, or the first adjective on a list of values(bolding?). Ideally “without censorship”, but that doesn’t seem that popular
“the best” “the soundest” “neutral”; don’t lie, mimblewimble requires tradeoffs from medium of exchange to get privacy and the inflation based design is a trade off from store of value to medium of exchange. Enough people have enough brains to know that and will find it disingenuous. Currency design involves trade offs and a mission statement isn’t for the children, someone could make a flashy animation for them later.
Minimalism remains the code and philosophical premise (not to discount the immense complexity of grin’s core devs’ work) and I don’t think we should undersell or oversell the project, and also not leave any room for interpretation (I agree with @monkyyy to the max on the mercurial nature of wording here).
I think grin is sincerely aiming to be the https of money. All of the other considerations and tenets only work to prove the efficiency and simplicity of this goal. If its as effective and standard and to the point as https it will automatically be all of the other things, lofty, grounded or otherwise.
If you know the history of https you understand the goals of grin as cash, and if you don’t you at least appreciate its universality.
Anything less or more I think clouds the waters.
Grin aims to be https:// of money. The digital standard for cash.
I think the mission statement might want to reflect Grin’s strengths compared to other crypto currencies.
Here’s how I compare Grin to several representative other designs:
Coin
Simplicity
Trustlessness
Scalability
Privacy
Fairness
Bitcoin
medium
high
medium
low
medium
Monero
medium
medium
low
medium
medium
Grin
high
medium
medium
medium
high
ZCash
Low
low
low
high
low
CODA
Low
low
high
high
low
The last column is about achieving a fair distribution of coins over time, an essential ingredient for long term viability. Coins with ICO/premine/mining tax score low here, while coins with fixed supply are penalized as well. Grin benefits from having not-far-from-optimal miners from day one combined with a big interest in mining it and of course the never-diminishing reward.
Perhaps the mission statement can reflect the balance of these properties, at none of which it fares poorly.
Nice table, sums up most of my thoughts on how the different cryptocurrencies compare. On scalability, why do you think Bitcoin and Grin are on the same level? Also, what do you think it takes to achieve high privacy in Grin?
Because my levels are pretty coarse:-(
Grin definitely does scale better, but not by an order of magnitude.
Well, it looks like it can be achieved by sacrificing some simplicity and trustlessness, for instance by implementing RSA accumulators. But we should not rush to make those sacrifices. Perhaps alternative approaches will be found to make tx aggregation much more effective. Approaches that do not require those sacrifices. Note that complexity is much easier to stomach when it stays outside of the consensus core of Grin. The above table is really about complexity in the core consensus layer.
Grin requires Latin soup parsing to understand and the pow is trying to be a proper pow rather then the hacks of encryption that sha-256 is, script is far simpler to understand then scriptless scripts. I don’t need to understand sha, I just need to know its considered unbreakable and people have had reasons to try to break it for a while and failed to publicly break it.
While there been growing complexity form its age, that will also be true of grin in oh about 3 years when sciptless scripts need to keep working, while people demand some hacks to get a feature.
Scalability
Grin medium
CODA high
Is there something about zk-snarks that I missed?
Granted I’m mostly interested in mw non-interactive combining of transactions as a source of scaling; I’m less worried about hard drive size then the average person in this space
Fairness
Should you really be making an official looking table on this topic without a caveat that your the one who wrote the pow code and kinda by default designed the coin distribution?
You declaring your more fair then bitcoin is kinda “k fam”
Still some tweaking to be done apparently based on the meeting today. Something akin to the second highest voted option, nice and simple, but with more optimized wording.
