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Will the star project Grin, which has not been launched yet, become the next speculative outlet?

遂心

2018-12-26 12:28 (UTC+8)

本文约6296字，阅读全文需要约25分钟

The spell is about to begin.

Editor | Lu Xiaoming

In the cold winter, the Grin mining group is quite hot.

official website

according toofficial websiteIt shows that Grin plans to go live on January 15, 2019. In other words, when the current encryption market is at such a low ebb, this project has not yet been launched, and a large number of institutions are eager to try it.

The project is popular, but the founding team is quite Buddhist. They seem not interested in investment. The Grin project has no pre-distribution of coins, no investment, and no ICO. All coins need to be mined by miners themselves. The team basically relies on donations to raise funds, so that they had a little difficulty in the early stage of the latest fundraising (but need to raise 16 BTC). Core developer Michael Cordner said in an interview, "Our community fund model does face some challenges, but it's the only one we think is fair to everyone."

The CEO of BlockCypher, the sponsor of the Grin US Conference, even condemned some investors and institutions, saying, "Our tickets are for developers, so your investors and institutions should stop pretending to be developers to buy tickets for the Grin US Conference."

All of this branded the team idealistic and ironically fueled the enthusiasm of the hype.

A user in the Chinese mining group commented: "The author (founder) really doesn't want Grin to be a hype target. But everyone in the group, everyone wants it to be a hype target."

Based on the introductions of all parties, the reason why this project became popular at the beginning is that its underlying protocol and projects were published by anonymous persons, and the community was decentralized and idealistic. Second, the team does not accept investment, and everyone can only obtain it in the form of mining, which is also similar to Bitcoin. Last year, xDAG also attracted a group of miners. In addition, Grin's monetary policy is very special: there is no upper limit on issuance, stable growth, and it is hoped that there will be no inflation or deflation.

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A cryptocurrency dedicated to providing 'privacy'

For "What is Grin", the official website explained in one sentence: electronic transactions for all, without review or restriction. And proposed its three characteristics include: privacy (private), scalable (scalable), open (open).

Unlike other projects coded in C++, Grin relies on the coding language Rust 。Its underlying protocol uses a privacy-preserving blockchain format called MimbleWimble，Making tokens fungible, users will have strong guarantees of anonymity.

The Mimblewimble project first appeared in mid-2016, when the anonymous developer Tom Elvis Jedusor (Voldemort's name in the French version of the Harry Potter series) published the Mimblewimble white paper. The white paper argues that Bitcoin Script should be jettisoned and a new way of recording transactions used.

Mimblewimble was originally defined as an improvement over Bitcoin. However, adoption of the technology by the Bitcoin network has been very slow, and choosing an independent cryptocurrency may be the best way for Mimblewimble to become a reality. Grin was created in November 2016 and became the first case of applying the Mimblewimble protocol. A second implementation attempt, Beam, appeared in April 2018.

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How does the core protocol MimbleWimble work?

Bitcoin transactions (or any currency transaction system) need to meet two conditions: it must be able to verify that the number of transactions on the receiving end and the sending end are equal, and ensure that each person can only make electronic transfers from their own accounts, that is, account transactions can only It is done by the private key holder. To meet these two conditions, the sender's address, receiver's address, and the number of Bitcoin transactions of each Bitcoin transaction are publicly available and cannot be called complete privacy.

As mentioned earlier, Mimblewimble was originally defined as an improvement to Bitcoin. Running a full node is the embodiment of the principle of decentralization advocated at the beginning of Bitcoin. One of the current problems of Bitcoin is the number of units running a full node. is decreasing, a full node hosts the entire blockchain history, making storage increasingly expensive to become a node.

Compared with the Bitcoin protocol, Mimblewimble is more anonymous and lighter.

MimbleWimble is only based onElliptic Curve Cryptography” (an encryption technique used in electronic currencies) in which only those two parties know that they are transacting, thereby preserving online privacy.blinding factor” (an encryption technique used in electronic currencies) in which only those two parties know that they are transacting, thereby preserving online privacy.

Pedersen Commitment SchemePedersen Commitment Scheme, in which a full node subtracts the encrypted amount (input) at the sender side of the transaction from the encrypted amount at the receiver side of the transaction (output).

A balanced equation means that no coins are created out of thin air, i.e.Nodes never need to know what the transaction amount is.

Let's take a simple example to illustrate how the blinding factor works:

1 + 2 = 3 // 1 + 2-3 = 0

It's just a simple balance equation showing that no new money is created (rearranged to show a net zero balance).

1（5）+ 2（5）= 3（5）

Here the secret number 5 is multiplied by all variables, which obfuscates the original value.

5 + 10 = 15

The value and blinding factors are now private and you can still prove that no new funds were created.

The creativity of MimbleWimble is that its blinding factor is actually a combination of the private key and public key of the transaction party, so through this equation, I can prove that the number of transactions is equal and I am the holder of the key.

At the end of the transaction, you will get a multisig of this transaction. This is much lighter than publicly keeping all inputs and outputs of the entire blockchain on a full node and throwing excess data out.

In MimbleWimble's block format, we can merge two events when one output is directly derived from another input. That is, A gives B a sum of money, and B gives the full amount to C. At this time, B is equivalent to not participating in the transaction. Therefore, B's data will not be recorded on the chain.

Sooner or later between blocks most outputs are consumed by another input, so all outputs can be safely deleted and the entire blockchain can fit in a few gigabytes or less (assuming the number of transactions is comparable to that of Bitcoin similar) for archiving, downloading, and full verification.

This means that Grin can scale based on the number of users (unspent outputs), not the number of transactions. Transactions within a block will not be identifiable unless you directly participate in the transaction.

MimbleWimble makes it cheap and easy to run a full node. Not only due to the fact that it only stores a small amount of data in the blockchain, but also because of its other properties.

(More about the analysis of MimbleWimble, you can readsecondary title）

Early mining algorithm anti-ASIC

Like Bitcoin, Grin uses a Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism, but uses a different algorithm called Cuckoo Cycle, an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) resistant mining algorithm that manages to Resistant to ASICs to encourage decentralization of miners. Currently, the design is placeholder ASIC resistant and will gradually transition from what was once fully ASIC resistant to algorithmic improvements to ASIC friendly over the course of a few years.

Michael Cordner "Yeastplume", one of Grin's core developers, mentioned in the interview that the Cuckoo Cycle algorithm was originally designed to increase the difficulty of ASIC development, but after communicating and thinking with many ASIC developers, the current purpose is to hope that at the same time Development in two directions is supported.

We believe that ASICization is inevitable, so instead of treating ASICs as the enemy, we hope to modify this memory-hard POW to make ASIC development easier - and ultimately achieve more ASIC choices from different suppliers. ASICs aren't inherently bad, it's just that they usually lead to centralization pressures - usually produced by only a very few suppliers.

In order to ensure that Grin is released as fair as possible, the team hopes to use Cuckoo Cycle's anti-ASIC performance in the early stages of Grin to enable the GPU community to join the mining competition in the first few years of Grin's development. 90% of the blocks in the early days will be generated by the anti-ASIC algorithm, and slowly drop to 0 within two years, that is, from the initial 90% GPU, 10% ASIC to 100% ASIC, so that manufacturers have two years The time to complete the development and production of ASIC mining machines.

The team maintains the anti-ASIC characteristics by adjusting the parameters of the algorithm every 6 months, hoping to achieve truly decentralized mining.

Since Grin is still in the testnet stage and the mainnet is not yet online, the mined Grin has no income for the time being. However, the entire mining process of the current test network is basically the same as that of the main network after it goes online, so you can experience it in advance. The mining efficiency is 1 minute to mine a block, and a block reward is 60 Grin.

The current test network shows that by using a brand new Macbook Pro (2018 i9) andraspberry pie(Raspberry Pi) or SSD disk, will have a net mined value of about 1/1000th of a block, which will be enough to run a full node. This means it is cheap and easy to run a full node, and new nodes will be able to sync up with the network quickly and efficiently. This could be very competitive when the mainnet goes live.

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Convoluted Monetary Policy: More Grin as a Currency?

There is no upper limit on the total amount, and the monetary policy of 60 Grin issued every minute has puzzled many investors. Grin's monetary policy uses a linear supply plan, and its currency issuance rate will not change, that is, the inflation rate will gradually approach zero. After Grin has been issued in large quantities, the inflationary impact of the new Grin will be much smaller than that of the early days.

Michael Cordner mentioned the reasons for this policy in the interview, he said:

First, if the monetary policy is deflationary, early miners will inevitably benefit more than later miners - this is not what we want to see. Second, we think this will make it easier for Grin to become a currency rather than a store of value like Bitcoin. If the value of Grin is less likely to change, people will be more willing to use it than hoard it speculatively.

Such a monetary policy has led some cryptocurrency researchers to revisit 2013, cryptocurrency pioneer Wei Dai’s comments on Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin. He mentioned:

“I think bitcoin’s failure is its monetary policy, which causes its price to fluctuate too much, costing users dearly, who either take bad risks or do costly hedging to use bitcoin.”

Some people speculate that some of the criticisms of Bitcoin's monetary policy in Dai Wei's comments may be the source of inspiration for Grin's monetary policy design.

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Low-key team: Two anonymous founders of 'Harry Potter'

The Grin team is quite low-key. It is reported that a well-known VC agency in the United States also donated money to the Grin team, just for the opportunity to obtain the contact information of the Grin core team.

according to sorting, the core members of the Grin team include:

John Tromp: Inventor of Grin's PoW algorithm Cuckoo Cycle, a Dutch computer and mathematical scientist, known for studying mathematical problems in Go;
Ignotus Peverell: An anonymous character, Ignotus Peverell is named after the owner of the invisibility cloak in Harry Potter. Ignotus Peverell is the initiator of the Grin project and the contributor with the most code;
Antioch PeverellAnitioch: Anonymous character, Grin's veteran developer, "Harry Potter" character, code contribution is second only to IgnotusPeverell;
Michael Cordner: Also known as @yeastplume, is the core developer of Grin and the top three code contributors. He previously went to whatbitcoindid for a radio interview on behalf of Grin. Because the first two are anonymous, so many times it is Michael Cordner who speaks or communicates;
Daniel Lehnberg: A bearded hippie best known for his Grin weeklyEcological Weeklyimage description

Daniel & Quentin

Quentin LeScelleraccording to

according toInterview with Michael Cordner “Yeastplume”，Grin's governance structure is not a strict top-down management structure, but has basically undergone a very organic and spontaneous evolution.There is currently a core committee of developers and long-time community members that makes some decisions about Grin's development. But this is only a phased state of Grin's development, and it is still evolving. The team hopes to strike a balance in governance structure and development that ultimately makes Grin's development as transparent and decentralized as possible.

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100% community driven, donations only

The official website shows,image description

(List of donors displayed on Grin's official website)

It is worth noting that no matter whether it is an individual or an institution that appears in the above picture, it is only a donation to the development team, not an investment. It can be seen from the figure that investment institutions including Continue Capital, KR1 and Cypher Capital have all donated money to Grin.

Layer1 Capital, the blockchain fund backed by PayPal co-founder and prominent venture capitalist Peter Thiel, said it is "deeply involved" in Grin.

So far, Grin has launched 4 fundraising requests, including 3 rounds of funding campaigns for project development and 1 round of personal developer funds raised by Michael Cordner. At present, the project is raising a security audit fund to pay for the security audit fee of the project. The goal is to raise 16 BTC, and 17.28 BTC has been raised so far, supporting BTC and ZEC donations, which are still open.

Due to similar privacy, many people will compare Grin with Monero/Zcash, and think that Grin is the new cutting-edge of anonymous coins, but the Grin community seems to be more open.

Whether Grin is the "another bitcoin" mentioned in David's comment or the new cutting-edge of anonymous coins, and how powerful MimbleWimble's magic is, we can only wait and see when the Grin mainnet is launched.

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References:

References:

The Idealistic Developer's Dilemma: Who Will Help Grin?

Sorting Hat Time? MimbleWimble Weighs Own Blockchain Launch

Grin's economic design or from Wei Dai's comments on Bitcoin? | Lost fast chain diary #B008A

Grin Coin And MimbleWimble: An Introductory Guide

Grin: a lightweight implementation of the MimbleWimble protocol

On Grin, Mimblewimble,and monetary policy

"Kep" | How to view ASIC resistance?

How to mine an explosive privacy concept Token at zero cost at home: Grin!

Bitcoins are not digital greenbacks