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Thanks for carefully laying out all the aspects with pros and cons, lehnberg!
Right now, Grin enjoys the luxury of a completely anonymous founder,
following in the footsteps of Satoshi Nakamoto.
That provides some protection against legal and regulatory pressure.
Shutting down Ethereum should be more feasible than shutting down Bitcoin,
considering that the Ethereum Foundation and its members, as official stewards of the blockchain, can be subpoenaed, prosecuted, or served national security letters. Ethereum funds can be frozen or seized, potentially crippling development efforts. But perhaps shutdown is not even the main worry. Subversion, by forced insertion of backdoors (cleverly hidden no doubt), is probably a bigger threat, especially for a privacy preserving coin.
So if deemed desirable, the powers and responsibilities of a Foundation should be carefully chosen to limit such liabilities.
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Thanks tromp, there’s plenty of room for improvement, but it’s a start at least.
Shutting down Ethereum should be more feasible than shutting down Bitcoin,
considering that the Ethereum Foundation and its members, as official stewards of the blockchain, can be subpoenaed, prosecuted, or served national security letters.
I’m not sure Ethereum is the right example. The Ethereum foundation does not control the Ethereum blockchain and is not involved in the governance process at all as far as I understand. It’s the EIP process, the Ethereum magicians, and the all devs call that together act as some kind of trifecta that lead to protocol-related decisions (when it works). More info here and here.
Zcash seems a more fitting example to the point you are making. Protocol development mainly happens through a development company, with an outspoken CEO, who’s deriving real financial gain from the project on an ongoing basis, and who’s also one of the founders of the project. In addition, the Zcash foundation involves itself explicitly in protocol and governance related topics. Both these two organisations are registered in Delaware, and subject to U.S. jurisdiction.
But perhaps shutdown is not even the main worry. Subversion, by forced insertion of backdoors (cleverly hidden no doubt), is probably a bigger threat, especially for a privacy preserving coin.
Yes, I agree. This is a strong argument for keeping the protocol as simple and minimal as possible in order to reduce the attack surface. Strong transparency and scrutiny of the development process itself can hopefully also lead to any foul play being caught before it’s pushed out to production.
As it appears to be easy to misunderstand this document, I’ve made an edit to include a Current status section to reflect our current position. Hopefully this avoids any further misinterpretation.