Definitely viable. The fact that Grin exists and some people are able to use it proves that it’s viable. But with many thousands of coins out there, simply being viable is not enough to remain competitive. We must give people reasons to choose Grin.
Simply having a fair launch and being minimalist won’t cut it. My hometown suffered the same fate many small towns in America do: We once had a multitude of grocery stores, ma and pa shops, etc. But then a Walmart was built and drove many of them out of business. People were naturally upset about it, because an “evil corporation” drove away the town’s locally-owned businesses, but that anger wasn’t enough to prevent them from enjoying the convenience of a 24/7 affordable grocery/clothing/pharmacy/jewelry/tool/etc Walmart. Sure, a few people stubbornly refuse to shop at Walmart because “principles”, but not enough to save the little local shops.
Not enough people will use a coin just because they like the principles it was built on. It will forever be a fringe coin if we don’t give users a reason to want to use it. It needs to make people’s lives better if we want Grin to have any chance at ever becoming money. In other words, we need to make Grin “a better money”. Not a more difficult to use money. Not a more principled or more minimalistic money. It needs to be a better money that is an improvement over the existing currencies. We can’t just settle for what’s “viable.”
Lol I had to google what “/endrant” means while scratching my head when no results came up. Then it dawned on me.
It was a good rant, I totally understand your line of thought and you put it well. But don’t forget to consider the numerous coins out there with instant confirmation, no fees, ability to earn interest natively, slick user interfaces etc. If conveniency is how we define “better money” then I’m afraid we’ve already lost, and we never stood no god damn chance.
Sure, we can make Grin exactly like any other coin out there, but will it make people want to use it? I would need a dozen hands to count the number of coins which employ this same transaction flow. On the other hand, we can take the less-known path and build amazing things out of our unique properties. I believe we can do that. And eventually they might very well be a positive differentiating factor.
Either way, our biggest challenge (and the most worthy one) would be to survive and sustain ourselves for the next few years. Many projects will die off. But Grin is in the final roster of privacy-focused currencies, at least for this decade. Let’s thrive, let’s be proud of our quirky features and then smirk at other bland currencies once we get to to dethrone them. To tell you the truth, what Grin really needs is a price lift to raise people’s spirit and get them out of their holes. One can only hope. The future will suddenly look brighter when that happens. But this is just unrelated rambling at this point.
/endrant2
p.s. I might still be convinced on non-interactive transactions. Didn’t happen yet though, guess I’m still the old grandpa who likes his ol’ fashion handshake.
p.s.2. who would want to use a currency which allows you to send all your life savings into oblivion in one moment of distraction? cough cough (apparently people do, even though it does not fit the common definition of better money).
I can help you with that. I run a small developer-blog where i ponder about various software-development related topics, like how to setup cmake with certain libraries, how to write tetris etc.
In the impress of the blog i maintain a small sentence:
Sounds fair enough, but however even this trivial task of sending me some Grin usually will not work.
The reason is, i don’t have my PC that my Grin+±Wallet is installed on, running all day. The PC is turned on usually in the evening hours and even then i most often forgot to start up my Grin+±Wallet. Also i don’t want to have the Wallet running at all times because when its synchronising with the network the fans run like wild and the device gets hot and i don’t like to have many background applications open.
TLDR: Nobody can send me Grin, although Grin works great in theory. I see an issue in this. People won’t change their habits for Grin. Especially not when it requires to have some software running 24/7 on PC because usually you shut the thing down if you don’t need it.
Nice example with Walmart. I think that with regards to transaction building, the inverse will be true in the long run. Interactive transactions seem to have the competitive edge when polished (yes, we need to improve the UX), so the other coins will need to catch up to remain competitive in this context. I find it interesting that other currencies are not going in this direction. As the user base of the crypto space grows, so do mistakes. Every month, money will continue to get lost due to the ‘send to void’ problem with new users being the most likely candidates to fall for it. It’s like an open hole in the middle of the sidewalk waiting for the new ‘crypto tourists’ to fall into it. Send to void alone should be a good enough reason to add interactive transactions in my opinion. That said, interactive txs need to be improved and the integrations need to be simplified. Things like 3-step => 2-step interactivity are nice examples of how we can improve and make the interactive UX better and I’m sure we’ll come up with more improvements over the next years.
I think the step of going from 3 step interactive transfers to 2 step interactive transfers for now is most important to move Grin towards better usability as @oryhp and @david mentioned.
What suprises me a lot is that no proper way has been found to seperate signing for receiving and for sending transactions to enable offline transactions, e.g. yhrough a special 2 in 2 multisig. As discussed many times before, so this is a rant, the transactions can besigned by friends, peer nodes or a third party service providers. Funds can be transfered to a users normal wallet once they go online.
Unfortunately I lack the knowledge and time to think of a proper sheme, but intuitively I would have expected this to be possible and not to complex although it might require a consensus change to allow these special multisigs. I will just observe while more qualified people solve it😔
Thats the spirit!
My rant is not against interactive transactions, it would just be really nice to be able to send Grin to someone and the transaction going through even if the receiver is not online in that very moment where i click on send because it may too often be the case that the receiver is not available at the moment of making a transaction.
This gets thrown around a lot, however, actual ways to improve the UX do not… I don’t know why everyone keeps suggesting that interaction is fine but we just need to improve the UX when there’s been a long, ongoing discussion on the subject and there have been very few. Perhaps the UX improvement opportunities are non-trivial, infrequent, and may not materialize.
Send to void is easily preventable. You could even build address checksums into the base protocol so it’s nearly impossible to send to an address that doesn’t exist. If “we just need better UX/wallets” is the answer, wallets could add better safety measures for non-interactive txs too. Perhaps encrypt the public address with a unique name that the user must type (could even be a domain name). So for example:
I advertise my encrypted Grin++ donation address 1abcdefencrypted, along with a unique user-friendly decryption key like “Grin++”, and a user copies my address, and if they fail to type in “Grin++” as the key, then the wallet can’t decrypt the address, so it doesn’t let them send. That’s every bit as safe as interactive txs.
We frequently say “interactive txs just need better wallets/UX”, yet fail to realize that non-interactive txs can be improved to be more safe as well.
Every once in a while i stumble upon something that reminds me about how amazing Grin actually is.
Thats an interview with the dude who created the NFT Bay which turned out to be some kind of an art project to demonstrate that NFTs are kind of stupid i guess. However he mentions something that really hit me:
Facebook is a single entity that knows a lot about most of its users and it proved in the past that it absolutely had no problem with abusing this power.
Blockchain technology is acutally way worse, since it allows everyone (!) to gain information about a user via his wallet. In the future many bitcoin wallets will be known / mapped to known entities / companies. So if i know the bitcoin-wallet of a friend, i could look up his whole history and find out where he goes shopping, what interests he does have and so on. The potential of abuse is enormeous and no one having a BTC address will even get a clue about who is stalking him, since literally everybody on this planet could do it without hassle. In terms of privacy open ledgers can actually be really really dangerous,something that is unfortunately little discussed.
Grins lightwight protocol solves this problem in a really nice way. You want to look up an address? You cant. End of story. I love it.
The wallets could change receiving addresses for each transaction, so the receiver wouldn’t be known (well kind of, depends on how deeply you analyze the network and who gives you the info) but yeah grin doesn’t have that problem imo (i think leaking tx graph is way less dangerous than people think). But an even more important thing is that you can’t have a scenario like this one, or even attacks where people airdrop you 1 million $ worth of newly created coins which you can only exchange on a site which scams you etc. To me these are all huge downsides of non-interactive transactions and i don’t think people are fully aware how big of a problem they can create
Indeed. Confidential transactions mostly solve this because by far the most important information to hide is the amount and CT guarantees that nobody ever finds out an amount of anyone else except themselves which is a great property to have. The second most important is address which is not a problem for us. The transaction graph is the third one and also an important one to work on, but MW has cool tools to battle this and hopefully relatively soon will also have MW coinswap protecting users from one another.
Even Monero users seem to be confused about what the root problem of some attacks is.
I’m more and more convinced a multi-sig only blockchain is at the very least an interesting and unique path and very fit for Grin. In a space full of competitors that are doing all sorts of experiments, MW is actually the only one I know where this is not just possible but natural.
Its about morons in Cryptospace who think for obscure reasons that hating crypto supposedly is proof that we are “still early” (which is not the case in my opinion). However, the highest upvoted reply reminded me a lot of Grins Spirit:
They love comparing crypto to the early internet, but they fail to see the main distinction between the two; the internet was just as useful to everyone at any point - whether you were the earliest adopter or a latecomer, you could always get the full benefits of the internet. There was no FOMO pressure to be early in order to become rich. The internet didn’t have to promise you wealth to get people to use it, and nobody who came late to the internet party committed suicide because they lost out on all those juicy early benefits.
If crypto truly wants to have future with mass adoption, it will only be able to do so if everyone will enjoy its benefits regardless of when you started using it. You can dream of mass adoption or a get-rich-quick scheme, but not both.
I think this is what Grin is about. Be useful. Be fair. The moment in time someone joins should not matter that much. I like this a lot.
download app… wait a an hour or two for the node to download. You have a fully synced blockchain ready to send and receive grin. Oh and you can do all that on your phone because Grin is 2Gb vs 680Gb(Btc) or 68Gb(Xmr) and you talk about more user friendly when others can’t even do the thing.
Where’s the adoption of whatever other coin you are using? Doge coin and NFTs goes up and you think that has any bearing on Grin? That’s just noise and market speculation (which isn’t adoption) while Grin has an economic model built to reward those who come later and not those first in (sorry)
maybe next time you enter a forum to speak you can bring something of substance other than low energy remarks such as these. Maybe you can even evolve and learn how to be constructive with your criticism instead of snarky and rude.
but that’s not the point of this thread- which has been so far an enjoyable assortment of unique features, respectable debate, and now even one of my favorite mems
Grin will have a bright future and it’s difficult to imagine in view of the circonstances. this is a community project that takes time to build especially if you want it to be still viable in 100 years when every other crypto currency will collapse under under its own weight.
Grin is for the next generations (users and miners) when inflation will drop down near 0 and the network can still be secured with an enchanged and fixed block subsidy (nobody can guarantee that any other crypto currency security can be ensured with only tx fees)
Grin has obviously a shrinking community. Since Launch it took various hits, the latest being the rejected Grin stack axchange Area 51 community that has been initiated by @renzokuken.
But since there is still development happening and people are regularly around, Grin certainly is not dead.
It reminds me a lot of a classic open source project, rather than typical cryptocurrency project.
Like many, i read a lot about various crypto projects. Grin always stick to me as the one that never felt like a waste of time. It’s a pity there are so few people here. But nothing has happened so far that would stop Grin from becoming more relevant again in the future. In the opposite: After launch Grin was a pain in the ass to use, this changed a lot. Its lightwight and useful. Nothing wrong about that. People might notice it some day.
But nothing has happened so far that would stop Grin from becoming more relevant again in the future.
We are currently in an irrational cycle where people only are looking for the biggest hype. Grin cannot and should not try to compete with hype coins in an irrational hype cycle. Obviously Grin is not relevant in this cycle. Grin can shine in a cycle where people start to think more rationally.
