Grin's problem isn't privacy at all, it's nobody using it
Editor's Note: This article comes fromBlock beats BlockBeats (ID: BlockBeats)Editor's Note: This article comes from
Block beats BlockBeats (ID: BlockBeats)
Block beats BlockBeats (ID: BlockBeats)
, Author: 0x22 0x29, reprinted with authorization by Odaily.
Grin, which was just launched at the beginning of this year, has not had a good year.
In other words, for Grin investors, the performance of this project, known as the "next generation of Bitcoin", is not as expected. After the investor was just fed a sweet date, he was slapped again.
On November 18, Ivan Bogatyy, a researcher at Dragonfly Capital, a cryptocurrency investment fund, issued a document stating that the MimbleWimble protocol has been found to have serious flaws and can decrypt 96% of the transactions in the Grin network, and the remaining 4% can be cracked by running the node network or a single super node.
Private transactions are one of Grin's biggest selling points and the biggest motivation for Grin to be used. Grin is based on a privacy protocol called Mimblewimble. The two parties using Grin will not be discovered by others, nor will they be able to see the transaction amount, which is safer than Bitcoin transfer.
When asked an engineer who was working on DApp development all day whether to choose Grin or Beam, he said that he didn’t know Beam, because people around him were all concerned about Grin, and said that he would take out his desktop computer for mining after a few days of work. , "Maybe dig up early bitcoins."
Also because of Grin, privacy has also become a hot track this year. All privacy transaction projects launched this year have attracted much attention. Even Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum, has emphasized the importance of privacy transactions for Ethereum on Twitter.
But according to Ivan Bogatyy, Grin is not considered an anonymous network at all now. Users using Grin to conduct private transfers can not only be cracked, but the probability of cracking is extremely high, almost 100%. In other words, he sees Grin's most important privacy-preserving feature as a bauble.
secondary title
A year ago, he questioned Grin
Ivan Bogatyy was a partner of Metastable Capital, and was also responsible for ML and NLP at Google Artificial Intelligence. He helped Ethereum fix large-scale smart contract vulnerabilities. It can be said that he has rich experience in technology and investment.
Just within an hour after Ivan published his opinion on November 18, V God "poured another barrel of oil on the fire". He made a comment on Twitter. He believes that only global anonymity sets such as zero-knowledge proof ZK-SNARKs can truly guarantee privacy security, implying that privacy protection schemes such as the MimbleWimble protocol that set a specific range of anonymity sets do not have real security. robustness.
One is an investment institution research institute with rich technical experience and background, and the other is the famous founder of Ethereum. When these two people disagree with the same project at the same time, the expression of investors can be imagined.
After the news was fermented, the user's psychology was quickly reflected in the price, and Grin fell by 10% in 24 hours.
secondary title
Donations of 50 BTC can't fork Bitcoin
You know, Grin investors have only been happy for a few days. Block Beats reported that on November 12, the Grin team received another donation of 50 bitcoins, worth more than $400,000. "It feels like 2009/2010 again", the anonymous donor left a message, and hoped "Please put it to good use for the development of GRIN. (Please use the funds for the benign development of GRIN)".
The time stamp of these 50 bitcoin sender addresses is shown as November 25, 2010, so many people speculate that the donors are early bitcoin believers. Litecoin founder Li Qiwei even believes that this is the bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto donated money.
Grin is the next more anonymous Bitcoin? "It's a perfect meme." Being recognized by Satoshi Nakamoto’s early followers, Grin became a hot search in the currency circle. In the next two days, Grin quickly rose by more than 50%, and led other privacy-related blockchain project tokens to rise.
No one expected that the plot would "reverse" a week later.
This isn't the first time the plot of the Grin has been reversed. In the beginning, Grin was really under the halo of Bitcoin.
At the beginning of this year, Grin and Beam were launched almost at the same time, and both are PoW projects based on the Mimblewimble privacy protocol. However, the degree of community attention for the two is obviously different. There is no pre-mining, no ICO, and even no investment. Grin, which only relies on community donations to maintain development, has received greater attention.
At the beginning of 2019, when the Grin mainnet was not yet online, BlockBeats recognized the concept of Grin and then published an article about the Grin mining tutorial, and helped the team maintain the Grin Chinese community. Unexpectedly, when the market was at the peak of the bear market, Grin's community actually attracted 2,000 people.
A project that no one can profit in advance has attracted so much attention for no other reason than that no one can profit in advance. In other words, this project is extremely fair. Even in order to make the distribution of tokens more decentralized, Grin is designed in the algorithm to resist ASIC in the first two years, and to minimize the impact of mining machines on decentralization.
However, enthusiasts also define Grin as "early Bitcoin", which has not been as successful as imagined.
Initially, the minimum requirement for Grin mining was to have a graphics card with 8G memory, which was the most popular GTX1070ti on the market at that time, and the price of this graphics card was 2,500 RMB. According to this requirement, ordinary gamers have the opportunity to mine blocks at home with this configuration computer. But the mining pools have thought of a way to modify the mining system so that the professional mining card P106-100 can also mine Grin. This kind of card is useless for ordinary people and cannot be used as a graphics card, but the mining pools that specialize in mining like it very much, and the cost is greatly reduced. At the time of the mine disaster, a second-hand P106 mining card only costs 300-500 yuan on the second-hand trading platform.
In this era, using Bitcoin to replicate the scene of early Bitcoin has been falsified by Grin.
The failure to achieve the early days of Bitcoin where everyone can mine has lost the confidence of many potential investors, and one of Grin's most important selling points has also failed. And now, private transactions have also been criticized.
This time the Grin developers fought back.
secondary title
The most fatal problem of Grin is not the breach of privacy protection
On Nov. 19, MimbleWimble/Grin developer Daniel Lehnberg scoffed at the notion. In his blog, he stated that "the claim to decipher the MimbleWimble privacy protocol is not true", the article mentioned is not a "fundamental inherent flaw", and the so-called attack and crack is a misunderstanding of known limitations.
Daniel Lehnberg retorted that there is no concept of addresses in MimbleWimble, and it is impossible to connect addresses that do not exist. The author of the original text did not realize that the transaction graph does not show information about the transaction parties. Without amount information, it is difficult to distinguish outputs.
To put it simply, he believes that Ivan did not crack Grin, it is purely title party, Grin's privacy transaction will not reveal the identity of both parties, it has always been.
Then Ivan responded to questions from the Grin team and the community. He mentioned that the purpose of this research is to "break the privacy model (that is, to break the assumption of user privacy protection), not to break the privacy protocol, which is another matter entirely." He said that the current problems with Grin need to be known to potential users and need to be fixed by the Grin team, so that privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies can be more widely used.
In terms of technology, developers have different opinions, and it is normal. Before the EOS mainnet was launched, Vitalik and EOS founder Daniel Larimer often exchanged views and answered questions with each other. It's just that developers have different views on a certain technology.
However, compared to fairness and anonymity, Grin has a more fatal problem, which was also admitted in Daniel's response: no users.
