Increase the forum's usefulness for its members.

Also, forum systems can be designed to encourage good behavior. For example, if I got everyone involved in sig ads to use a forum-provided signature management system / stats tracker, then I could show only a "modified impressions" value which takes the real impressions value and subtracts from it if the person is getting posts deleted by mods (or something like that).

Honestly, I find signature advertisements distasteful, and it is not impossible that I will someday ban the practice. However, it's obviously an important part of the forum ecosystem today. So if you use signatures for advertising, what are your suggestions for forum improvements in that area?

For example, one idea I had was to allow users to subscribe to campaigns that other users set up, and then the campaigner could automatically push signature updates to everyone subscribed, and also track exactly when and for how long each user was subscribed. Would this be significantly useful? I'm not all that familiar with how these signature campaigns work, so I'm not sure.

However: the forum will never intermediate these transactions. We will not touch the money involved or perform any sort of "screening", etc. Also, I have no particular desire for the forum to take a cut of sig-ad transactions.

(I'm probably not going to implement anything in this area very soon, but the matter has been on my mind lately, and I wanted to see what people thought.)

I'm not that interested in mining generally -- haven't mined anything in years --, so I can't really give advice. Solo mining will give you at least as much average income, but with more variance.

IMO the current price is roughly fair on a fundamental level, but I also wouldn't be surprised it it falls a lot more.

~1.5 MB max block size, with a block per minute. Transactions are much larger than Bitcoin, though. So about 14 tps right now.

Bitcoin's scaling is limited to a large degree by the need for historical blocks to be widely available. Grin on the other hand can mostly forget its history, so its full nodes only need to store/process live transactions, and grin can safely increase its max block size linearly with worldwide Internet speeds and/or CPU speeds.

Many altcoins just increase their max block size and hope for the best, but if any of these altcoins were actually widely used, this would cause severe centralization at best or total system failures at worst. It's like putting a bigger "max capacity" sign on an airplane. Some altcoins have ways of cutting out old history, but although there are theoretically some not-too-bad ways of doing this, usually altcoins do it in really centralized/stupid ways (eg. checkpoints, or ETH "full nodes" just not bothering to verify anything by default), and even in the best case it results in a loss of functionality and security. grin is the first coin with a reasonable, decentralized, and secure way of dropping historical data.

The prices and ratios in the forum's automatic payment handling are not permanent, but I only update them manually from time to time.

Grin transactions are not immune to double-spends. Offline in-person Bitcoin transactions would have the same level of security.

In the "This is a self-moderated topic" warning, stats will now be printed about how many posts have been deleted if any posts have been deleted. The stats start now, not the beginning of time, and they are cached for quite some time. If any of the deleted posts had any merit before they were deleted, then this whole stat block will be printed in bold. Currently the stats never reset; I haven't decided yet whether this is OK.

Yeah, I'm not making major purchases now or anything. And I definitely wouldn't mine it if doing so becomes unprofitable (though in fact it seems very profitable right now due to hype). Price-wise, IMO it'll start looking like a good buy if it hasn't been superseded by clones in about a year. I'll be looking for a point of low sentiment at that time. Some people have said that you'll need to wait like 3 years before it escapes from its inflation pit, but keep in mind that Bitcoin's inflation-rate-over-time was roughly the same in its first 4 years; such high initial inflation is why you saw people buying pizzas for 10k BTC like it was nothing. But growth, if it occurs, can overcome even pretty massive inflation.

The tech is just so awesome: a high degree of privacy combined with by far the best decentralization-preserving on-chain scaling tech ever devised, plus several smaller innovations in grin's particular implementation. Even if it was somehow guaranteed to halve in price every year, I'd still consider it cool and want to do something with it.

Yes. Grin transactions always work in a multi-step process like this:

There are also methods involving IP addresses, keybase.io, and a "grinbox address" service, but behind-the-scenes these methods do the same steps as above, where the sender and recipient need to cooperate in order to form the final transaction

Glad it worked!

No.


s/fixed supply/predictable supply/

Yes, that combined with its privacy is what makes it so exciting. You can probably achieve even greater scaling with BTC+LN, and I consider that quite likely to be what the economy actually goes toward, but grin is a very different and interesting alternative approach.

TMAN, you're coming across as a real asshole here. AFAICT, that topic is highly analogous to the English discussions. The main addition is that they're looking to get more local representation in DT1, which is very reasonable. I'd prefer if people not treat trust lists as an election, but if I had wanted nobody to ever think/talk/strategize about how trust lists affect DT1 selection, I would've kept the DT1 criteria secret.

They quickly found a quote from me where I previously documented that usernames starting with tildes are handled:
So they knew right away that the ~DefaultTrust account was harmless.

I see nothing concerning with xandry's actions there. Nothing there comes close to warranting deletion. Even if someone was openly talking about trying to form a strategic DT1 manipulation group for the express purpose of undermining the system, such a topic should not be deleted; rather, I'd look to handle this within the DT1 selection criteria.

XMR is possible, but probably not the others.


Since the inflation rate is so high in the first ~year, I think it will probably go even lower, probably under $1, and I'd expect the price chart of the first year to be a general downward trend. Again, I don't particularly recommend buying this stuff, and I myself am not going to be buying large amounts soon. But if it survives for several years and ends up competing effectively with other coins on scaling and privacy, then the inflation rate starts becoming reasonable even despite its unlimited supply (see my comment here), and we could at that point see an upward price trend. Even at $1 it'd be an extremely risky investment, but in any case it's an extremely interesting piece of tech.

And I'll be periodically adjusting the forum exchange rate, BTW.


Satoshi created Bitcoin and this forum in order to change the world, not to create a "Cult of BTC". In fact, Satoshi recommended creating Namecoin, the first altcoin. (Though Namecoin ended up being one of the bolt-stuff-onto-cloned-Bitcoin systems that I've never really respected.) I'm not going to start jumping on every alt bandwagon and treating every cryptocurrency as just as good as any other, nor do I believe that grin is currently anywhere close to BTC in terms of overall utility. But grin has true merit, and if you're interested in Bitcoin for the same reasons that Satoshi created it (freedom, privacy, and interesting tech), then grin is worthy of acknowledgement.

Mimblewimble has privacy features, but it also has the first really impressive, true scaling solution in crypto. Privacy-wise, Monero is probably better overall, but its scaling is abysmal, and neither coin can be treated as an impenetrable black box.

I think that grin-tech.org is just down right now. Nevermind, fixed. Thanks.


Since everyone who invested in howeycoins became a billionaire, I was worried about what would happen to the world economy if I promoted it even more.

November 2021 update: grin payments are currently not being accepted. My payments code broke, and since grin payments were never very common, it hasn't been a priority to fix it.

I'm super excited about grin. All past altcoins have been just Bitcoin with a few bits tacked on; occasionally these extra bits are useful/interesting (eg. Monero or Ethereum), but in the vast majority of cases this extra stuff is just meaningless marketing-oriented garbage. But grin is packed full of useful innovation from top to bottom; moreover, it's clearly built in the same cypherpunk spirit that Bitcoin was: increased freedom/sovereignty through technology.

Therefore, I'm happy to announce that the forum is now accepting grin payments automatically, probably the first site other than exchanges to do so. You'll find a link at the bottom of the evil-fee and copper-membership pages.

grin is new and clunky to use. I don't expect many people to use it, honestly. But I needed to rewrite the forum payments system anyway in order to support LN in the future and to fix some longstanding issues with the old code, so adding grin support worked out nicely.

I don't recommend buying or not buying grin. Due to its emission schedule, I'd guess that its price will have a general downward trend for quite some time, but who knows. Currently I own zero grin (though I will be buying from the forum all grin obtained), I was not paid to add grin support, and in fact not a soul knew that I was going to do so. grin support might be removed later if it dies off or becomes too time-consuming for me to maintain.

I tested this with grin's floonet (testnet), but not mainnet yet since I don't have any grin. Hopefully it works.

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A few observations I had while implementing this:

By default they want you to essentially pay to IP addresses. This was stupid when Satoshi tried it 10 years ago, and it's stupid now. At the very least you should strongly encourage (ie. nearly force) people to give out public keys along with their IPs, since otherwise MITM attacks are trivial. Even then it sucks to require the recipient to run an open-to-the-Internet server at all. And for goodness' sake, don't use the broken/centralized HTTPS system; the Bitcoin Core devs have been going to a lot of trouble trying to remove that garbage from Core.

A better protocol for the copy/paste method is needed. For one, you shouldn't have to use intermediary files. I was annoyed when I did grin wallet send -m file -d - and it actually created a file called "-" instead of writing to stdout like it should.

grin needs to be much better at handling transactions that never continue beyond the first or second step in the three-way transaction process. They probably shouldn't even show up in the main transaction log.

Currently I think that there's no way for the recipient to get the modified slate after running receive the first time (eg. if it gets lost), which is nuts. And currently there appears to be no reasonable method for proving that you sent a transaction.

I'm not a huge fan of the fixed subsidy, but it is deflationary long-term. Because the subsidy remains the same while the money supply grows (and may shrink due to lost coins), a graph of the inflation rate over time is steadily downward, and will eventually reach low levels. However, since their stated reason for doing this was to ensure that miners are properly incentivized, it would've made more sense to set the subsidy such that the monetary inflation rate is a constant 0.5% or something. As they've designed it, the inflation rate will start out way too high, and then if grin survives for a very long time, it'll eventually become too low to actually meet their goal of incentivizing miners.

Inflation will ensure a general downward price trend for at least the first year, I'd expect, and it becomes sort-of reasonable only after 4 years. Will grin survive that long? Not sure. If you think it will, then it might make sense to buy grin at very cheap prices in its first few years, and this thinking could perhaps stabilize the market somewhat.

Grin inflation rates

Year #	Yearly monetary inflation rate
1	36500%
2	100%
3	50%
4	33%
5	25%
6	20%
7	17%
8	14%
11	10%
21	5%
34	3%

It's possible that people will get just too fed up with the inflation in the first few years, and everyone will move to a clone, similar to the Bytecoin->Monero switch. Beam is too much of an obvious cheap money-grab to succeed IMO, though.

In addition to the money supply issue, grin is a worse store of value than Bitcoin because:
 - The dev culture is built upon a more flexible idea of system consensus. There are expected to be regular hardforks.
 - The crypto is experimental, and the currency is far newer.
 - Smart contracts are more limited, though at this time I'm not exactly sure how much more limited.

A BTC-backed grin clone could be a Bitcoin sidechain, but you won't see this anytime soon. First of all, there sadly hasn't been that much work on Bitcoin sidechains. Also, although you can do a semi-centralized sidechain without any consensus work or widespread costs, a full-security sidechain involves a softfork which would require all Bitcoin full nodes to also be grin-sidechain full nodes, increasing full node costs. I'd guess that if it happens at all, it won't be for 3-5 years, after grin has proven itself. At that point grin could have a significant first-to-market advantage, and its inflation will be reaching reasonable levels.

Unlike the vast majority of other altcoins, grin was basically built in the same spirit as Bitcoin - the same ideology. I'm a "Bitcoin maximalist" because I believe in "the Bitcoin idea/ideology", not as part of some game theoretic strategy to make BTC's price go up. If Bitcoin is out-competed in all respects (which grin is very far from doing, and other altcoins aren't even in contention for), then it'd be good for Bitcoin to be replaced by that competitor.

IMO in 10 years:
 - 30% chance grin is defunct, but roughly the same basic features are provided by other BTC-based off-chain systems such as LN.
 - 25% chance grin is defunct, but basically the same thing exists as a widely-used Bitcoin sidechain.
 - 15% chance BTC is the main store of value in crypto, while grin or a very similar altcoin is used for most daily payments.
 - 1% chance grin advances significantly, and combined with its first-to-market advantage vis-á-vis its innovations, it out-competes BTC entirely.
 - 14% chance some other altcoin out-competes BTC entirely. It won't be one of the existing ones, except perhaps grin as mentioned above.
 - 15% chance global authoritarianism makes it very difficult to use cryptocurrencies at all, and the whole sector is reduced to a tiny niche.

Mainnet is released: https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin/releases/tag/v1.0.0


Damn, you're right. Well, I'll still buy a few grin as soon as people can sell them.

It's just that I last changed the price when the BTC/USD price was $12k, so it's drifted from the intended value. Evil fees will also be updated.


Then I'll (eventually) adjust it downward again. I like to keep the BTC-denominated price pretty stable and not change it every time the market freaks out in either direction, but it's supposed to have a vaguely consistent real value.

Are you guys EXCITED????

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I don't know how it works with mining specifically, but in general: grin payments require a three-way process. This can be done automatically through an IP address or keybase, or you can do it manually like this:

1. The sender runs grin wallet send -m file -d FILE.txt GRIN_AMOUNT, which creates the file FILE.txt.
2. The sender gives FILE.txt to the recipient.
3. The recipient runs grin wallet receive -i FILE.txt, which creates another file FILE.txt.response.
4. The recipient gives FILE.txt.response to the sender.
5. The sender runs grin wallet finalize -i FILE.txt.response, and the transaction is done.

The IP/keybase methods do these same steps, just automatically.

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I'm not going to be mining, but I would like to buy some grin ASAP on the first day. If anyone here is lucky enough to quickly mine some, I'll pay $13/grin (in BTC), but only for the first few grin I buy. PM me.