This episode of epicenter is brought to you by Microsoft
Azure and figure and deploy a Consortium blockchain Network in
just a few clicks with pre-built configurations, and
enterprise-grade infrastructure, spend less time on blocking
scaffolding, and more time building your application to
learn more visit. It's a Ka, dot Ms, / epicenter.
Black-and-white episodes episode 278 with Michael Jordan and
Daniel, mpeg-2 cool developers from the grid implementation of
the member window protocol. I am pitted against my name is
Sonia Agarwal and so like, Freddy Krueger mentioned, today
we have two of the developers from grin.
You know, I kind of greatness is very interesting project that
has a very interesting background.
Sorry that will get into today and you know, I kind of heard
about them very early on and there, you know, Creation with
the member window protocol first came out and kind of ignored it
for a while and then in the last couple months like you know it
just suddenly gained a lot of adoption.
They launched very recently just last month.
In January. There were like I think probably
the few projects who announced a launch date and actually met
their launch deadlines which as you know, are very cool.
And just you know one disclaimer is I am currently actively
mining grin so just a little bit of a disclaimer there Lexa jump
into the episode. Today on epicenter, we have on
with us Michael corner. And Daniel Lindbergh to of the
core developers of the grin blockchain which implements this
very interesting protocol called member limbal.
And so, you know, throughout the epicenter, you know, we've
briefly touched on member Wendel here and there a lot of like,
you know, we've had Adam back on before and Gregg Maxwell and
they've like slightly touched on member.
Wendel mentioned it in passing as like, you know, future
scaling options. But you know, we never really
got a chance to Fully Deep dive in into member wimble.
And, you know, it's just very interesting protocol where like,
you know, offered a lot of a, you know, in a ways it's very
similar to like the Bitcoin protocol.
Like use a lot of the same topography and a lot of like the
same intellectual basis, but you know brings a lot of these
really cool features and you know, it has this really cool
backstory to it which you know will cover throughout the course
of this episode. But you know before we get start
but you know, For we jump into that Michael and Daniel.
Thank you guys for both for being on.
And, you know, Michael, maybe you can introduce yourself how
you got started into the space. Like, you know, before even
getting into grin and member lhendable and then, Daniel,
maybe you could do the same. Yeah, sure.
Okay. Well, thanks for having us.
What? Just starts on.
My name is Michael corner and I go by the name.
Do you boom? In green circles, that would be
my handle and I've been working on grinning for.
I'd say, we're coming up on nearly two years, maybe a little
less than two years at first, just as a part-time developer
contributor. But from about say, February of
last year, I've been working on Grand full-time using donations
Get into Grand by the community. So previous two grand.
I was I mean I have about 20 years worth of kind of overall
software development experience, ranging from Financial two
games, to kind of do educational software.
So so I think kind of a good broad background there
immediately previous two to working on grin.
I was doing kind of a lot of low-level cryptographic work on
in The Smart Card industry, which has a bit of crossover
with with cryptocurrency industry when it comes to
Hardware wallets. And what have you?
So yeah. So that's basically my
background and why I'm here today?
Cool. And how did you get you know,
get started with Bitcoin is like green sort of like the first
Block Chain project you've worked on.
So it's the first one I've worked on properly.
I mean I've been following Bitcoin and derivatives for
quite some time, but it was only kind of recently as I got kind
of more of a got better at applied photography through
previous jobs and then the more kind of cryptocurrencies tended
to appeal to me because I realize it kind of pushes all my
buttons when it comes to interest and too technical in
arrest rather. I see.
Very cool and Daniel. Yeah, what about you?
How did you get involved? Sure.
Thank you for having us. I work as a product manager for
a gaming company. Been there for the past 12 years
lately. I've been doing a new product
development and I heard about grin the first time I think year
ago and started reading up on it, starting to get kind of
watch the space a little bit, read the get it chats and so on,
and then becoming Good morning involved.
Mainly on kind of the project management side and the
governance side and I've been following the Box in space for a
long time. This is my first project IE
heard about Bitcoin in 2011 dismissed it and then bought
bought a Bitcoin in 2013 and then kind of been monitoring the
space but being quite comfortable watching from the
sidelines until I stumbled upon grid and its structure the way.
Way the ethos of the project was and you know, the approach taken
in developing it made it really attractive and made it really
easy to participate. So I just kind of got sucked in
well that's interesting and so most of the great developers is
actually Anonymous, right. But you guys here on this show
using your clear names. You also go to conferences with
your clear names. What, what made you decide to go
public with your identities? I probably wouldn't say mostro
Anonymous. Now, I think there's only two
pretty who were chosen to remain completely Anonymous and that
signal assist the founder. Which I'm sure, we'll talk about
it more later and then we have another developer Antioch
parole, which in Harry Potter. Laura's is brother who also
chooses to remain anonymous, but the rest of us are fairly fairly
out in the open. I mean, for my own perspective,
probably just didn't know any better when I first got involved
with the project so that's why I'm out in the open, but also
because I'm taking funding from various sources.
I Well, it's a bit. It's better to be out there.
So people know who they're dealing with and, you know, I
can be have their own podcasts and promote written without
having to worry about that or not, that invisibility cloak.
Yeah, it's similar for my side. I mean, I know I was aware, they
were Anonymous developers on the project, but the I just kind of
did like a Trade-off in the sense that, you know, in order
to be really Anonymous, you have to put in a lot of effort to do
that and I just didn't really see that, you know, either you
do it, you know the full way or you don't do it at all, there's
no point in it because if somebody needs to want to, it's
motivated enough to find your identity, they will and and I
just didn't really seem. I see a need for it.
I think a lot of the reason why we might feel comfortable being
out in with clear names is also because the founder of nostris
is anonymous, it Been a bit different if it wasn't for that.
So you mean like over time some of the core developers are who
maybe were Anonymous earlier after slowly started like
revealing their identities over time?
No, I mean, what I mean is, I mean, there's only two who are
actually actively trying to hide their identities.
The rest are just using nicknames online, but that
doesn't mean that they're actually trying to be perfectly
hiding in their identities. You see what I mean?
Oh, interesting. Okay, everyone except for the
few who are Anonymous. We know, personally and we met a
few times now. It's actually quite hard to keep
yourself in animus and do it. Well, it's quite a Time sink as
well and you have to be really kind of dedicated to it to do it
to be able to know you know know exactly what you doing online
and be able to cover all your tracks.
And all cases is challenging. So it's quite a lot of effort.
It's interesting that that says something different, to the
public perception that that did a lot of the developers are
actually not a but that's probably just because, you know,
the the found it himself or herself is autonomous so yeah,
yeah, that's right. Yeah, cool.
So you know, that's maybe that's jump into a little bit of this
founding story then and so you know, I think there's II, you
know, I remember I was teaching a class on bitcoin back in like
twenty fifteen or Thing, and I think that's around the time,
you know, we went to school or teaching this class, we heard
about this like, oh, there's this new proposal that's been
our around. That was just like, posted on.
Like, you know, I first saw it on our / Bitcoin, but, you know,
can you tell us a little bit about this story of how this
white paper got? Put into the world and who put
it there? Sure, I think he's from his I'm
here. So I'll do that.
So basically there was this IRC thread our secret for Bitcoin
developers. It was it was it called Bitcoin
wizard, right? Pick an anonymous person.
Basically came in there and dropped the paper.
That outlined the kind of the sketched out, the kind of the
basic concept of member Wendel, which was then picked up by
Andrew pole, straw, and I think, Brian Bishop Bishop as well.
And they kind of had some interactions there and and we
post that and repulsed for formalized, some of the concepts
in there into a paper and took it from there, right?
Because it from what I remember like, you know, the original
document wasn't even like it was like literally just a text a DOT
txt file that was just dropped in there and it had like it's
look, they're just like, you know, if some quick thoughts on
like what this guy was thinking and like some ideas and also,
you know, for the listeners, one of the, you know, one of the
cute little story things there is.
It was signed the the anonymous person, they signed them
themselves. Using the name, Tom Elvis, J
disorder, which is like, you know, the French name of
Voldemort like in the English versions, it's Tom marvolo
Riddle, so it's the French Alias.
So yeah. Do you guys have any like, you
know, guesses as to who it may have been like, you know, I've
heard like, you know, clearly in the text file.
A lot of these ideas were heavily derived from like, Greg
Maxwell's previous works like coin, join and confidential
transaction. So I've you know I've heard
Greg, I've heard it posited that you know it may have just been
Greg himself or you guys have any like theories on who this
was, or is it not even like of interest to you and you actually
don't even care to find out. I don't, I don't personally have
any theories on it. It would be interesting as what
as you just said there. I think that's kind of key.
There were a lot of the member Wendel favorite builds.
A lot of builds upon a lot of ideas that were already there.
I kind of developed by established photographers the
actual kind of portion of it than that makes up member.
Wimble is just kind of a small Insight / addition to what was
already presented before. So whoever was didn't
necessarily have to be a great cryptographer.
It was Made a great flash of insight wherever it came from
but no to me and I mean, I don't think we're ever going to find
out who it is and even if the even if whoever it is makes
himself known no one's probably, no one will believe them at this
point. So I think we just have to leave
it as a mythical creation story that this point right there was
like no cryptographic signature or anything all over the file.
So there's not even any way to know.
Like, no one could even prove it at this point.
Anyways, just a text 12 and so what was Andrew poster has
contribution here so you know I remember so this file was as
positive and then like you know what was the original kind of
response to this is where the people like immediately.
Realize that oh, there's like something big here or was it
more of like people like okay another proposal and your poster
was like did it take time for him to realize that oh there's
actually something like you know much more insightful in this
document here. It took I mean, I wasn't around
in the early days but from what I can see and Andrew pollster
had to look over it and just to make sure that it was sound, I
think there was a mistake or two in there that he eventually
corrected and I mean he was interested or not from that to
write further white paper on how an entire member wimble,
blockchain would work and I mean he published a further kind of a
proper white paper based on that, which is a little bit
outdated at this point. But and then he had Mother kind
of a distance to it of that, you may have seen some
presentations. It has about about how to do
some additions to its grip the script because there's no
scripts and number wimble. There's a lot of a lot of things
that you can do in Bitcoin or it's obvious how to do in
Bitcoin by scripting that you can't necessarily do as
obviously in November but you can still do it.
So a lot of kind of additions to the protocol like that some of
them theoretical some of them real fixes to what was there and
I think that was it. I mean, after the publication of
those papers, I mean he hangs around if we need to get ahold
of them to ask many questions I've used there, but he hasn't
been to two active. Now, over a table at the past
year, either busy or working on other things at this point.
So, yeah, That's interesting. So in a way it's it's unusual
for someone to actually pick up a proposal by someone else
completely and so deeply immersed yourself and it that
you actually find mistakes and can add to it substantially and
make it into a fully-fledged proposal.
What would you say helped for this to happen?
I mean, do you think this is just a lucky break for member
wimble? Are there tons of those
proposals out there that just someone needs to pick up and
make into something great? And I thought it did.
Andrew. Look at this and saw the gem in
the dirt. And you know, you know, how do
you think about this? If you drop a new proposal for
something, or a new idea on in a place, like Bitcoin Wizards, it
will generally get looked at fairly quickly by by some
serious serious people in the industry.
So, I do genuinely think that this, it's not just a matter of
getting luckier, you know, being filtered somehow.
It was genuinely a very, very, you know, transformative Insight
on what was already there. So, yeah, like I said, the
obstacle team, we've seen plenty of papers go.
There's actually another A paper put down by someone, claiming to
be the same Voldemort in this in a similar style that was
dropped. Maybe about six months ago and
that was looked at in completely trashed by the community as
well. Notice, that makes absolutely no
sense that this and more to the point.
This is probably not the same the same Voldemort or if it was.
He got lucky that one time so so yeah I don't think there's an
element to that. Like I think there's a genuine
if you have a good idea and you presented in the crypto space it
will get considered generally. Yeah I think he was The the
original text file was far from perfect, as you said it, had
some errors in it as well, but it was actually presented.
Very succinctly and very approachable way, which also
helps, of course, because it makes it easy for anybody who is
reviewing its to understand, whether there's some merits to
these arguments or not, because it was building on already
established Concepts that were already popular in the space.
That also, made it much easier. So how did how did it they
continue on from there? So how fast that this proposal
That Was Then transformed by Andrew post.
Ra how fast did it pick up steam?
How fast the developers actually come on board.
Well, the first are many Andrew wrote the paper.
I'm not, I think it was kind of not quite forgotten about.
But, you know, put aside for a couple of months, it was only
when, when now ignore someone by the name of ignored, just a
girl, who was the founder of the project appeared again on the
same channel. I think it was around December
of 2016, roughly think. I think even October, I think,
if I remember cuentas presentation, so it was quite
fast. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. And then he said I've had this
was I've actually started a an open source version of this and
uploaded the code and invited everyone to take a look.
And I think it was it's clear kind of from the early
conversations that there was a it was almost obviously apparent
that this diagnosis peverell person knew what he was doing.
And you know had put up a was starting a really serious effort
to put together a memo window blockchain then.
I think I think also there was yeah a few months later towards
December the middle window. Full mailing list was
established which probably also helps a lot in kind of taking
the project forward. It was a lot of discussion going
on with a lot of noteworthy and kind of well-known people in the
field contributing. It's also kind of helped raise
the awareness of the project itself.
This episode of epicenter is brought to you by Microsoft and
the Azure blockchain workbench. Getting your block tank from the
Whiteboard to production can be a big undertaking in something
as simple. As connecting your blockchain to
iot devices or existing Erp, systems is a project in itself.
Well, the folks at Microsoft had you covered.
You already know about the Azure blockchain workbench and how
easy it makes bootstrapping your Block Chain network
pre-configured with all the cloud services you need for your
Enterprise app. Their new development kit is the
IFTTT for blockchains. Suppose you want to collect data
from someone in a remote location via SMS and half that
data package in a transaction for your hyper Ledger fabric.
Blockchain the development kit allows Allows you to build this
integration in just a few steps in a simple drag-and-drop
interface, here is another great example.
Perhaps your institution, working with etherium and rely
on CSV file sent by email one. Click in the dev kit and you can
parse these files and have two data embedded in transactions,
whatever you're working with the dev kit can read transform and
act on the data to learn more and to build your first
application and less than 30 minutes, visit aka.ms/offweb
Ascender and be sure to follow them on.
Her at msft. Blockchain would like to thank
Microsoft and Azure for their support of epicenter.
Maybe now, we can kind of start talking a little bit about.
Like, so we keep saying this like nimble, wimble, blockchain
and this move of protocol, but like, you know what, even is
this member limbo protocol? And so, you know, maybe we can
start off with, like, let's assume our listeners are, you
know, relatively very familiar with the Bitcoin protocol.
How would you explain memo wimble to them and kind of
explain what's going on here? Right.
Okay, well, I think it's rather than just kind of jumping it
into the mechanics of it. We should.
We should say what, what, the goals of it are, and that would
be together by to provide what I call very good, privacy
intrinsic to the blockchain. So, now on some other other
coins that may have been made, have been originally derived
from Bitcoin, the Privacy would kind of be bolted on in certain
ways. Like so your other cars, like my
narrow would kind of put You different ways but the core of
the chain itself would kind of be the classic Bitcoin chain.
As in The Ledger transactions, going back forever with the
middle window protocol, you have the Privacy built right into the
core level. So if I put, if I perform a
transaction, what ends up on the chain is basically, it looks
like random data. And this, the way this is done
also allows some other interesting properties to come
out of there. Such as Positive effect on the
transaction size or on the chain size, it ends up.
You end up getting a much the same privacy as other coins with
the much greatly reduced storage space requirements, as well as
some other kind of nifty features that are on to it.
All of its kind of add together to enhance privacy without kind
of the load that you may get some other chains so that's kind
of fundamentally, what member Wendel itself is about.
So you see as the primary benefit being the Privacy step
side of things? Yes, absolutely, I know men, its
built-in, it's at the protocol level.
It's not optional interest because I remember when I like
first heard about member Wendel, I always actually usually are
when I heard about it in the context of, you know,
scalability and like, you know, increasing the sink times of
like, of the chain. But then I feel like I only
started actually hearing about the Privacy benefits, like, you
know, later on. So it's interesting that like,
you know, I guess I just I obviously, I haven't been asked.
Over there. So I guess I kind of heard of I
didn't really hear what the Privacy side of thing until much
later on. It's definitely like it's a
privacy point. It's a confidentiality pointed
out that would pretty much be the from our perspective at
least the number one. The number one reason for being
the scalability stuff is certainly nice to have and it's
something that that we're improving on as time goes on.
You know, Finding ways to make it even more scalable, how do we
reduce the size of UT? Exocet, Etc, probably talk about
some more. Technical details later on.
Yeah, and maybe it's good to kind of point out that.
Yeah, there's the member window protocol, which we talked about
which was kind of dropped on the IRC Channel and everything.
And then you have Grim, which is an implementation of the member
when the protocol, but it's so much more than that as well.
Of course, it's not only the protocol itself, but a bunch of
other things and different approaches and philosophies that
add to that, actually, and they kind of a key key.
Things that can really stand out in terms of implementation,
implementation wise. For from, from when I think, is
that is tries to be very privacy-preserving to the
greatest extent possible. I tries to be scalable and and
it tries to be minimal in the approach that it takes and its
design as a, as a blockchain. In general, to be very kind of
lat lightweight, and that kind of contributes also to the
Privacy aspects because you don't want to put a lot of
information. Formation on the chain and so
on. You want to do as little as
possible, basically. And that that adds to it has
like some nice properties to it. There's no, there's no addresses
on the train, for example. And so on which it contributes
to it being lightweight, but it also helps in the Privacy
aspects of it. So I see the Privacy aspect is
the main feature of in Belleville, but the scalability
is also one feather add-on that you want by the add-on benefit
that you get. Could you briefly explain how it
works on a technical level. Yeah, that's remaining.
This is kind of it is a bit difficult to do without without
whiteboards and a bit of time and then dealing with confused
stairs but basically instead of how Bitcoin Because you have a
ledger of transactions, going back to the beginning of to the
Genesis block basically and you need to verify each and every
transaction in order to start a new note Nimble window works at
a bit more mathematically. So, so rather than The Ledger
itself or having to validate the measure itself, you just need to
validate the some of what's happened before.
So when I put maybe I can try and walk through bit of
transaction example, if I perform a transaction, right?
Right? I have inputs and outputs and
transactions are basically a load of inputs.
Plus your book, plus a bunch of outputs, and it doesn't matter
how many there are. It doesn't matter how many
participants there are just a number of in the amount of the
inputs that have gone in have to equal the amount of the airports
that have come out. Okay, so long as that's true
then the transaction is valid. Now on top of that we have
something called an excess value which is used to prove Which is
used to to enhance privacy, as well as prove ownership or
something. So, say, I have a load of trans
a load of inputs and it adds up to a certain number will then
choose a private key that represents another addition to
that number. And only, I know that number so,
and that's my private key. So, in order to validate, that
inputs outputs, plus my private key that I've chosen, which is
in excess, Everything equals 0, I can do that without actually
having to store the values of the amounts in there, right?
So validators can just add this all together.
Check it out and check everything, equal 0 and move on.
So that's fundamentally. What happens on a simple window
blockchain. Does that make any sense?
It does. So I think it's actually really
difficult to explain with without white wood as you said.
But party, what do you say? It's fair to describe.
Hi bit as being cryptography. That is well known and is also
used for Bitcoin with additional elements for our first occasion.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean that we basically use the
same Library that's used in Bitcoin.
We use the same the same curve. It's all based on the same
fundamental mathematics. It's just the way we're kind of
putting it together is slightly unique, remember wimble?
Okay? And so this results in a
blockchain, we're not only the transaction amounts of skated,
it's it's also offer skated where they're coming from and
where they're going and that's what do you what do you say
that's factually? Correct.
Yeah, it is truck. I mean I wouldn't even say
they're all disconnected, they're just not there.
Yeah, there's not enough so I should say, you know, that this
is no there, no addresses on the chainsaw.
Of course, you're not going to see from where it's going, but
there is a chain of of outputs of utx cells essentially
unchanged, but it, but it's very hard to derive.
Making any sense of that. That's basically the only
information that is only served if there's no address is right?
So, you know, how do signatures work in this system, right?
Well, let's take that a signature.
It's a signature basically proves that I had that that
excess value. Could I was talking before
because I've that's that's what I use to sign.
The outputs that I put into a transaction right on in the
blockchain itself. It's kind of its outputs all the
way down. There's no transactions on there
and in order to spend an output I need to ensure that I have
this excess value for each and every output that I put on there
and then all of these added together become I have to prove
Of, I knew the sum of all of these and then validate that I
can sign with that, and validators will be able to use
that to, to prove, you know, to witness the thing.
And to prove that I have the right to spend it.
I see. So essentially what's going to
happen here is like you know there's some excess value in
this last transaction that was sent to me and I am the only one
who has knowledge of it and I'm able and by revealing that
proving that knowledge of that, I'm the only one able to spend
this but Did this excess value get into the previous
transaction. So, you know, how did yeah, why
is it in the output from the previous transaction?
If I did like, didn't that mean that whoever sent me the coins
had to have known that excess value right now, they knew their
excess value but when, when a transaction happens I create a
new one which represents my things.
So what happens is someone sends me a bunch of inputs for a
certain amount and then I will create and as well as The
signature will contain their excess value and that gets sent
to me. And what I do is I create my own
excess so I can create an output for that amount, right?
And then I have one output that I know the excess value for and
then I can validate all the inputs that came into the
transaction from the other person, equal that amount.
So the sum is there and that's how that's how that's validated.
Right. So one of the key features are
differences here with the member wimble system is that in order
to receive money. I have to actually like you
know, be part of the transaction making process right up right on
any cryptographic strength and say that's an interactive
transaction. And that's the thing, too.
It doesn't mean you need to be online.
It doesn't mean it doesn't any of those connotations.
It just means two parties, need to interact to, they need to
exchange information somehow, and that can be On the Internet
by steep here can be via sending files to each other.
It can be via 10 count on a string, it just has to happen
somehow. That's not have any implications
for the user experience as opposed to, you know, when you
compare it to sending say Bitcoins.
Oh yeah, tons of it. It's, you know, it's a very,
very different experience and so it for good and bad as well.
Write it so so it's just different, I would say.
So, as Michael said, there's a full round trip, is required to
complete the transaction which means that I as a sender, need
to send you some information, you take that information, you
process that Get back to me then I can finalize it and put it on
the check. Right?
But that also means that in order for unlike, for example,
Bitcoin, where you can just kind of in the blind, shoot
transactions, to addresses here, actually, both parties need to
participate in order to receive which in some cases can sound
like it's a lot of hassle or work but in other cases it's
actually really good because then you can actually, if you
want to make sure you have to keep like an audit Trail or like
kind of keep your finances in order you can.
Or that you have full control of the funds that you receive
because you're actually actively participating in receiving them.
If you see what I mean, nobody can kind of spam you with with,
with a bunch of transactions. Right.
Some people actually may actually see this as a pro
because I remember about a couple weeks ago, this is like
YouTuber who I like to follow his name is Tom Scott and he
kind of got into an argument with Brendan eich who is working
on as you know Brave or basic attention token and he was kind
of getting upset that in Brave in basic attention, token.
And so and really any most cryptocurrencies day, Bitcoin
theorem that people have the ability to send you money
without Out. You're like, you know, consent
essentially and this could have like weird sort of legal or
regulatory consequences. And so, you know, to some people
they might actually see this as a pro and like, help the like
adoption from like a legal perspective, as well.
Absolutely. And also from like, you know,
from from the from the, from the point of like being a merchant,
right? Then you said, you know,
instructions to your customer, how to pay you.
It prevents a lot of user error as well, because if you use it
does The wrong you'll hopefully, you'll detect that is part of
building that transaction. And you can reject those
transactions rather than the user setting it to the wrong
address. Getting that processed and then
saying, Hey, where's my, Where's My Money?
Where's my, where's my stuff? And the you have this kind of
Disconnect where you try to figure out what actually
happened here. It's much easier to do that in
an interactive protocol. Whether Merchants can kind of
sense, check whether it's the correct behavior.
In this, expected behavior from the customer.
But it is it is also like I should say it's a different
Paradigm than like what's usually being done today in
blockchains. So there is like a lot of kind
of extra effort or thinking that that goes into it from like
Merchants perspective and also from users perspective.
So so it is, it is a kind of a different approach that that
we're taking Okay, so in member Wendel, while it's interact to
create privacy preserving, interactions, how does this help
with scalability? Right.
There's a few things, I think most simply in order to think of
if I'm a new node on the network.
In order to sync up, I don't need to have the whole history
of the chain behind me. I need I simply need to have the
headers and I seem to Simply need to have enough of
something. What we call the transaction
kernel, which contains all of the all of the signatures today
to make sure that they add up to zero and I need to make sure
that those all that up. So instead of you know, if you
if you think a new Bitcoins I know for instance, you're
downloading the whole history in this case, no, you just need to
download the headers and then enough information to make sure
that your thumb with the some of the entire chain equals zero.
And then you should be good to go.
I mean, it's only early days for the green chain at the moment,
but you can already see like this.
Distinct process is a few minutes and that should
provided, the header think time. Kind of is fast enough that the
same time should remain fairly constant for a new node coming
on, no matter how big the chain is.
So that's certainly one advantage.
There. And there's other ones which are
probably. They were mentioned in the
paper, but they're probably in practice, not quite.
As quite as you know, good for quite as Bountiful say, for
scalability, one of them is a notion of core through which is
if if I send transaction I send the transaction to somebody and
they immediately send it to somebody else.
I can actually cut out some of the outputs in the middle of
that because everything was still light up.
So I'm basically I'm basically taking, you know, the same
number of both sides of an equation and yeah Daniel may
have stopped give anything to add as well.
Yeah. I think you covered it but I
wanted to point out that it was part of that thinking process.
This is not like a light clients think or anything like that this
or as PV approach, it's actually like a full node sink and and it
gives you like proper security guarantees.
And it's much faster than, you know, And she'll approaches.
Right. Yeah, I mean so I've actually
been you know gambling around with like the grin nodes and
like I've been trying to run a grin minor over the past week or
so and so when I actually started I opened up my grid node
and it's like sink in a matter of like 30 seconds or so.
And not that like the green box chains only been around for a
month anyway, so it's like it wouldn't have been that long
anyways, but it kind of blew me away that like, I'm like, woah.
Did it actually just sink? Like, I probably messed
something up. I need to try this again.
Like like it kind of blew my mind.
Yeah, we got it's early days for the blockchain but it's even
after a month like it should take longer.
If it were traditional blockchain it would be taking
longer already. So right.
Exactly. And so that really amazed me
there so with this cut through thing.
So you know you're so you're saying we can, you know, kind of
like to give some intuition for the listeners.
Essentially, what we can do here is once transactions have been
spent, we can kind of like Delete them from the train.
Essentially we're aggregating, everything that's already spend.
And so all we have is the current UT exocet and nothing of
the history, right? Is there.
And so does that mean it's constant?
Is there any like piece of data that has to stick around from
the history? Or is it, does it all completely
like 100% disappear? No, no.
The transaction kernels need to stay around and that's probably
the biggest potent. The biggest Point against
scalability or something very much like You see, there's no
way to currently compress the kernels into, you know, into
some them off. Basically let you can most other
parts of the system. If you do figure that out one
day, then we're going to have a very very compact blockchain.
I'm not even sure you can call it a chain and at that point
could you explain slightly what this Colonel is like, right?
So the signature I was talking about earlier.
There's a few, there's a few things that most importantly, is
that signature, that proves the value and that's, and that
becomes part of a sum. So if I need to sum up all of
the kernels, It's in the blockchain.
I'm basically done basically summing up everything that's
ever happened and so long as it equals 0, it doesn't matter how
many there were, where they came from.
Then I know the change is valid at that point and that all has
to be contained within the kernel.
Which unfortunately haven't found a way to to get rid of at
this point or some I see. And so that one question,
another question here is, I'm sure you guys may have heard of
a project called Coda which is like they use sort of what they
call a recursive snarks to achieve actually somewhat very
similar properties to what you're achieving here and so but
you know the benefit here is with snarks.
You kind of you know you can do more than just these like basic
transactions. You can kind of essentially in
theory you You know, you can essentially put any sort of
computation into here including like very complex, smart
contracts and whatnot. But you know it seems the con
here is you know obviously they're depending on somewhat
more complex topography. And so what how do you, how do
you see the comparison between this member Wendel protocol and
these code of recursive snarks? Yeah, member Wendel itself.
It's being considered as a positive or negative but because
it is so succinct the cryptography that use, it's
basically algebra top of Photography that there and
because it's so statista Saint and so kind of compact and kind
of self-contained, it's difficult to kind of put any
other stuff around it necessarily.
So like there are no scripts in there but I mean we were talking
earlier about this notion of script the script.
So there are there are ways kind Their mathematical trick tricks,
a lot of them still still theoretical but could be
employed on top of this. So that's that's kind of the
main difference. I think that it's so succinct
and so compact that it's difficult to sometimes add more
functionality to it or to think of how you're going to add
functionality to it and those who it's as you pointed out it
relies on minimal security assumption but the discrete
logarithm problem is hard and that's it.
You know, that's that that's very, very important and makes
it a big difference. Yeah absolutely.
I mean member Wendel, it's zero knowledge.
All the way through zero knowledge proof.
They all the way through We didn't episode on Kota a couple
of months ago. So if you're interested
listener, go check that out. So how would you say does member
when Bo compared to Z cash on one Arrow or other privacy?
First chains, I'm from what perspective?
From a technology technology perspective.
Orgasm from a functionality, the functionality and Technology
perspective. I mean, they're both of them
kind of touch upon things. We've talked about, like, I and
again, I don't want to be disparaging to any of these
projects are just purely a point of comparison and we have a lot
of respect for the present cash and mineiro in particular, it's
so that cash rent, we're talking about it.
It's based on the historic Seaver talked about earlier, to
completely trusted setup. Nimble wimble itself and any
member Wendel coin is going to be completely zero knowledge.
So although there's no not like a key ceremony or anything to
start it up, it's all completely trustless.
And the case of Manero, I mean they have a lot probably saved
more privacy features than what's in member Wendel at the
moment. But a lot of that comes out an
expense. So they use Briggs ring
signatures at some point. They use was coming to mind
right now, but there's all of the kind of different methods
that Have Bobby skating transactions are kind of on top
of a Bitcoin like structure. So, and again, remember when
Bill itself is just a very compact concise way of doing it.
So those would be kind of the main comparison points.
I would also describe manero's more kind of mature.
It compared to wood grain is but granny simpler.
There's a lot of more privacy features in more narrow but
still grinning simpler and achieves kind of a lot with a
little space and kind of approach minimal approach with Z
cash, you have, which fully shielded transactions, better
privacy properties. But as Mike was saying, requires
a trusted set. And also has this problem of
shielded versus unshielded transactions.
So you don't have actually privacy on by default in the
protocol itself, which is very different from from from
grinning that comes with its own kind of problems.
I know that Z cash companies and then the foundation is actively
working to improve that and have more, and more transactions
going through the shielded ones, which are more computationally
expensive than the unshielded ones.
But that's a big, big difference.
And then we have governance approaches of these of these two
projects we certain sort of generally different as well.
So when you think of like, you know, the impact, you know, the
effectiveness of a privacy solution, how I usually like to
think of it as like, you know, what is the Privacy set the
anonymity set here, right? And so when you, when you use
manero's ring signatures, you're basically choosing a couple of
other transactions to mix in with.
And the end your anonymity set is only the size of a few
Actions like no. No, I think the default was
about 5 or something. And then the idea is, as you
keep making more transactions gets muddled.
But in Z cash, the anonymity set is the entire set of all other
shielded transactions. Right?
So, how would you, what's the? And so clearly the anonymity set
of Z cash is much much larger than that of Manero.
Where did, how would you describe the anonymity set of
member wimble? Right?
All right with bring signatures in particular.
I believe those are used mostly to cover up the the transaction
graph as in if someone is following, you know is
monitoring nodes and is watching transactions, they can kind of
start to piece together information about what's
happening there and then, that's something that that's an ongoing
challenge that we always have discussions about that right
now. We have a protocol in place
called called dandelion which is an a you know, an attempt to To
hide not completely concealed. With certainly make it more
difficult for someone to follow a transaction graph.
And that works by instead of just one or no get to
transaction, it doesn't just burst it to, to every note, it
knows about it actually follows during what we call a stem
phase, send it to one node, sends to another node to another
node. And eventually you know, Brandon
Lee one of them will then do the fluff phase which is broadcast
to all of the piers at nose. In terms of the Ottoman and
annuities that in theory, it, you know, because you're doing
with member. When will you support
non-interactive coin joints? If assuming that the, you know,
you can aggregate all the transactions, but basically in a
block or, you know, send out an aggregated transaction broadcast
out to the chain as well. So you have a lot of kind of,
there's a lot of opportunities to improve that anonymity set as
it goes out. Galaxy.
I mean my if you're looking if you look at the blockchain, they
have nothing else to go on. You just looking at the contents
of the chain of the Ute, exocet there isn't, you can get
absolutely nothing for out. There is no way to get anything
from it and the points of the system and the anonymity set is
very much based around. How easy is it for someone to
construct the transaction graph and reconstruct, what happened?
And it's something that we're continually working on through
through various, you know, Research into various
Technologies and additions to what We're doing if like you
know once transactions have made it onto the chain.
It's essentially a coin, join amongst all transactions that
have happened and so it does kind of give you a, you know, a
very, very large anonymity set but it doesn't solve the problem
of, you know, the what of observing the peer-to-peer
Network and you know, anyone who's trying to break privacy,
will definitely be doing that. And you know I know companies
have done this in the past. I've seen Alice's and And so,
that's where this like dandelion comes in.
And dandelion is sort of this like privacy feature in grin
that is actually no, completely independent of member Wendel.
It's like a separate privacy feature.
And so, you know, you described it a little bit about this,
like, fluff thing. But, can you look describe it a
little bit further from my understanding?
You can kind of think of it as this like tour Mix net kind of
thing for transactions is that like a my having the right
mental model here? Here or I mean dandy-lion
itself. That there's a few things
happening dandelion and member Wendel itself are very
complementary Technologies, okay?
Because in order to perform this this coin type aggregation that
we've been talking about it needs to be done in one way.
And one way only before his the chain because you could have
problems. If all, if all nodes everywhere
or putting together transactions and lumping them together in
different ways. And then you can end up with
with issues when they try to get to be.
We got apply to the chain now with dandelion because
dandelion, there's a distinct phase where the transaction is
being sent from one note to the next note to another node one at
a time, along the stem, as I was calling it that gives us an
opportunity to apply this this coin to transaction as we go
along. So as a trans actor, as a
transaction goes through the stem phase, it gets aggregated
with with other transactions as it goes along until finally.
Since until finally, it gets to, you know, at some random point
one no we're gonna sit, right? No more aggregation.
And then explode and then all of the nodes are all of its peers
know about it and it gets propagated that way to in
building. When you do you do the boss like
you basically Evernote kind of just immediately when they have
something to broadcast the broadcast it out to everybody,
they're connected to the network, right?
And here the purpose of dandelion is basically to do
that but it's just not you who Does that kind of explosion?
The gossip protocol used said pass the transaction that you
have through one of two directions and then there's
basically a coin flip between for every node whether they're
gonna spread it out or just pass it along to a single node, that
makes it much harder for somebody who's monitoring the
entire network, to figure out where that transaction
originated from the network. Because just because it gets
broadcasted out from a note, doesn't mean that that note that
the action belongs to that note, if it's, if you see lemon, okay,
so, you know, maybe we can like kind of walk through how this
dandelion process works. So essentially happen, here is,
let's say, you know, we have this large Network and I'm the
one who's creating this transaction, I'll go ahead and
send it, you know, maybe to Michael Michael, you'll send it
to Daniel. And then Daniel has this, like
seed thing that like, it tells them when it's time to propagate
it. Right?
And so, he'll be the one to like, push it to the rest of the
network. But where's this aggregation
happening? Is it that like, let's Say if it
just so happens that the two stems of a dandelion intersect,
then that person whoever had that intersection of two of the
stems that Veil like be the one who's locally aggregating it.
Yeah. So so there will be, you know,
at every Epoch there will be a couple of notes that will be
fluffing notes and a lot of transactional going to end up at
those fluffy nodes and at that point they get aggregated and
before they get flushed up, okay?
So there is some mechanism of like so the the path of the stem
isn't just completely random to the peer-to-peer Network.
They are kind of moving towards some aggregator notes who will
do the aggregation. In there, but it changes after
every Epoch, it kind of resets and everybody cannot do.
I new connections and so, how does the Louvre?
At least that's how it's done in dandelion plus plus, which is I
think what we're actually, I think we have a simpler version
implemented in in England, today, it's like the original
dandelion paper and I think this version 1.1, I think it's going
to come out in that approach. How are these nodes chosen.
Exactly. Their chosen at random amongst
themselves. Like there's a coin flip on each
side. Am I going to fluff it?
Or I'm going to pass it along this time and that's just in the
in the current simpler version. But I think they're the reason
that there's a 1.1 of this coming out is because it kind of
reduces the, the chances are the occurrence, the chances for, for
any aggregation to happen. So for aggregation to happen,
are you need a transaction to come into OneNote?
And then two and then to be stem through another node that has
some other transactions in it, right?
So what channel just described for done deal and plus plus is a
way of ensuring that more aggregation happens in the
dandelion Network. So what happens if there's not a
lot of usage on the network and they're not enough transactions
to actually compound Yeah, if they're not a lot of you should
then been transactions, don't get, don't get aggregated.
I mean, you'll see, I mean it's early days for the chain so I
mean, you'll see a lot of blocks there.
It's you know, one transaction in there are two transaction in
the more one plus the coinbase. So yeah, I mean, the more users
are on the network. The more transactions are going
around the greater the chances of there being aggregation, so
it is, it is definitely related to the the amount of usage on
the network. Let me that's also why we're
building it. I mean, we're not building it
for kind of like low usage and see what we go.
We don't really have any interest in doing that.
There's nobody kind of like it's better off for doing that.
Instead you know, everybody's kind of working towards this
idea that this is going to be a, you know, a big well Use
protocol that's the Assumption. So.
So as you just briefly mention it, the mention Grand, actually
launched January, that was last month.
So green is actually the implementation of remember when
both are both of you are working on and we kind of skipped over
about this. We skipped over this like a
little bit. There's also another
implementation name beam. Would you, can you tell us how
bement grin actually differ from each other?
The green was launched in October 2016.
I think and the beam is a second member, Wendel implementation.
That was announced I think in May or June something 20 2018
and they do is they take a different approach governance
structure organizational, they are there's a development
company building that visiting different language has some
adopted some of the approaches that we do in Grid.
But they are on their own cannot separate.
Path is not like a fork or anything.
It's their own separate project and you know we in general of
course, is going to be many different women with limitations
if anybody who wants to can put one together.
So so I think that's that's it. But it's very kind of it's a
very different structure in terms of how they are organized
and what their approach is to some of the things So is there
like you know, what is the extent of the relationship
between the teams is there like a lot of information sharing?
Because I know for example, you know, the green team is that one
who kind of came up with this idea of dandelion and so then
being kind of adopted it. But I know there's also
something interesting Innovation happening from the beam side
where, you know, I was reading some of their documentation and
they have like a mechanism of sort of these kernels.
We were talking about that are being left in the chain.
They have a method of like, kind of pruning those out and
incentivizing the pruning of the Those.
They also have this a bulletin board thing that they were
talking about, we're like it helps with this interactivity
needed. So is there any like what is the
kind of the communication between these teams and like,
you know, any plans? So kind of like Port over some
of their features back into grin.
Right. So just to point out that you
know, dandelion is not our invention.
It's Julia fonte. And some other researchers that
have a particular protocol and yeah, there are different.
You know, in general the Grim project interacts with any team
or any kind of any individual researchers that want to
interact and want to share knowledge in like an Earnest
way. We do have some kind of
communication with the beam team as well, they donated to our to
our fun. And we don't have like a like a
good relationship with them generally though, what kind of I
think green is focused on is to do this very kind of minimal
implementation that doesn't have a lot of overhead and doesn't
have a lot of keeping things simple and and we're definitely
open for influences a new ideas when it came out.
And when they do, we evaluate them, we met them and then you
know, if they're good we adopt them.
Any thoughts on the current? Like some of the ones that
they've already started on, like this bulletin board, or the
kernel fusion and stuff. Maybe the kind of the
fundamental difference here. I think is that the grain is as
adopted a community approach to a lot of things.
So for instance, like the bulletin board that you just
talked about is basically it's a way of dealing with the the
interaction problem that we were talking about earlier.
How do you, how do people interact?
How does it work? If someone's not Well, how do
you send funds to somebody without without them being
around or online to perform the transaction?
And and I mean Grim have a being at brother has a what a piece a
prescriptive approach to this right?
You built a bulletin board and you do your chores actually here
in this is a solution grins approach is to leave that up to
the community and other authors. So for instance, for the that
particular problem, our approach is to provide a very decent set
of wallet tools to do the fundamentals of building
transactions and politics. And then let the community come
up with different ways of handling solutions to these
problems, according to different needs, you know, some people
might might only want to meet in dark alleys with Bits of Paper
and that's how they want to do their transactions and that's
fine. We can support that other people
might want to come along and build some Solutions on top of
that. Like there's a there's a there's
an open source project called wallet, 713 that has another
solution built on, top of that. Each time you arrive at a
solution like this on top. Top of member Wendel.
You're also adding, you know, you're actually lessening the
security and confidentiality a bit as well.
So that has to be taken into consideration.
So, I think like a fundamental approaches Community, we're
trusting the community to take written as the core layer, and
then build build custom Solutions, or whatever suits
various groups on top of that. Yeah.
And I mean it's exactly as Michael says, and I mean, that's
the beauty of it because it's not prescriptive and, and it
lets, you know, basically the community figure it out and try
different approaches and see what is the one that's going to
get traction and usage. I-i'm for full disclosure, I'm
involved in bullets of 13 and the green box, transaction
protocol that we're doing. And the reason why we did it was
because we saw a need for it, an opportunity to do it, that would
make sense to add some value. So, we do that.
And as a result, there's now, you know many, you know, there's
another team now doing building on top of gray, right?
And I think, if you look at it, you know, if you take a, like, a
macro view on it, it has to be many different development
teams. Trying to solve specific
problems that they have, you know, make things better in the
usage of a chain rather than like this Reliance on like a
single entry point. And I think it's a single
Central kind of company or whatever organization would be.
I don't. Think that's a scalable approach
because, you know, it becomes. Yeah.
You need to let like many
attempts kind of to solve the same problem and see which one
works basically. It's like the bizarre versus
Cathedral discussion. Writing software development.
So you know, we talked a lot about nimbala humble and just
dandelion stuff but you know and I know another area that you
know, the green team has been kind of like developing heavily
is you know kind of innovating on this like you know
proof-of-work algorithm as well as like you know experimenting
with like new issuance models and inflation models.
And so you know I know you guys are using this proof-of-work
algorithm called cuckoo cycle and like you know it kind of
started with this. Desire to try to create like an
Asic, resistance hashing algorithm, but then over time,
it seems that like the goals of this hash proof-of-work
algorithm design have changed heavily and now there's this
like, you know, complex are to system version and it can you
kind of explain to me what's going on here?
Sure. So this is like a high level
kind of summary of this like a family of proof-of-work
algorithms created by John Trump called, you know, the cuckoo
cycle family which basically the algorithm then the whole
objective is you have like this bunch of nodes connections
between different units in a hash table.
The cuckoo has table and the objective is basically to find
like a 42. 42 loop loop that connects 42 notes, and that's a
solution for your proof of work. And as a description of what we
do today, we have basically two proof of works.
One is the Asic resistant algorithm, which is kind of
optimized towards gpus. And the other one is an Asic
targeted algorithm, which is optimized towards a six
development. All right.
And When we launched the balance between these two proof of work
was that 90% of mining rewards was going to the GPU and 10% of
mining rewards are going to the Asic tuned algorithm over time
in the course of two years. This is all this balance is
going to shift completely. So that 100% of mining rewards
are going to Asic tuned. So, in two years time, the idea
is that everybody is going to be mining on the Asic to And
algorithm. Originally as you pointed out
there was one proof-of-work could recycle and when John
first initially review of the workout Ryan who was believed
that it could run, you know that you could mine efficiently or
competitively using a mobile phone.
It's a but overtime. Optimizations were discovered
that basically meant that CPU mining was ruled out as
efficient and it was like a big advantage Just for basic minors
to, you know, there was a lot of opportunities to build efficient
basic miners using the cuckoo cycle algorithm.
Now, the reason why we moved away from from a single proof of
work into to prove it works was that this algorithm was known
and it was available widely known before we launch the coin.
And we had received several very credible indications, that a six
were being built for this algorithm which would add day
one of the launch of the coin. Completely taken over the hash
power and kind of centralized entire mining which we didn't
really want. We don't even think that was a
good idea. We do however see that because
of all these you know time doesn't stand still and what
we've learned since you know, John first published at that
algorithm and since the beginning of Grimm is that you
know Asics are inevitable and there will always be a way to
kind of do if optimizations and even if you're not going to
optimize on the Asics, you're going to be able to optimize the
guy mining with a GPU at home. It's not going to be as Isn't
this as the person who's connected to a dam in China and
has 10,000 gpus. So there's going to be a lot of
efficiencies and that's inevitable.
However, trying to launch a coin in a fair manner, in 2019 puts a
couple of problems to that. So you need to have a way to
basically bootstrap the network in a way that gives people some
chance to mind fairly to the point where, you know, you over
time, you can gradually shift over to To this, Asic friendly
algorithm and give a sick manufacturers enough.
Leeway in enough time to prepare for that and have multiple a
seat. Manufacturers may be billed at
the same time in order to create as competitive of a Marketplace
as possible for these police Asics, it was very kind of long
answer, but that's kind of my view wanted Michael, you know,
if you have anything to add The thing about the Grant in our
process, the work is a sex are going to happen anyways and that
doesn't matter. You can you can try and avoid
it. You can try and design an
algorithm that you know, can't be done, it won't happen.
They're going to happen at some point.
So, the best thing you can do is try and make it as fair for
everybody and try and actually make it your algorithm simple to
specify for a six manufacturers to allow more of them to allow
Market. I mean a system cells aren't
necessarily They're actually, you know, the closer you get to
sound. This is something again, we're
back to Andrew Colstrip. A tree called the thermodynamic
limit. If you had a machine that was
absolutely. The most optimized it could
possibly could be her proof-of-work, algorithm, and
everyone has one of those machines then every time that's
actually the best. The best case for mining there
is so by encouraging AC development and hopefully there
will be a you know a few options to choose from they'll be
readily available. This should actually help secure
the network as I was yeah. Lost my point.
There is like mining 886 themselves aren't evil.
It's when they're all under the control of a single entity or a
single Corporation, then that's a centralization pressure.
So by trying to encourage as many to Pez many Hardware
developers becomes develop a sex and we're hoping for a more fair
market. So, you went with them, the to
proof of work system in order to ensure continuous
decentralization throughout the life of grain.
But there are disadvantages that come with proof of work.
And this is why many people are talking about switching to proof
of stake for many different chains.
Is this something this, that is in a concern for you as grin
developers as well? Are you firmly committed to
proof-of-work? Now, we're very firmly committed
to proof of work. Moment, nobody has proven that
proof of stake. Will secure that will secure
network as well as proof of work.
Nobody has proven that, you know, it is entirely Fair like
it very much rewards. People who already have a steak
and proof of stake and it Sono. The, the green team at the
moment is very much proof of work only.
Yeah. As someone who's been working on
proof of stake for like, you know, two years.
Now, I actually completely agree with you.
I don't think there's been any evidence that like proof of
stake and properly secure network and especially It seems
that like you know grin seems to be one of I've heard the story
where it's like you know didn't seem to be like the next best
bet at money other than Bitcoin. And like you know if you want to
create decentralized money you know you need to have had a
similar origin story and Anonymous founder and like and
so if you're creating I just don't think proof of stake works
properly as an issuance mechanism for, you know who
it's, you know, who knows what will be in 10 years time in
general that the team and the community in general, General is
open to any new technology as long as it's kind of, makes
sense. And that is at this stage proof
of stake, doesn't make sense as you correctly pointed out as
well, you couldn't, we couldn't have launched with conclusive
proof of stake because it creates huge problems of how you
distribute the coins fairly. And at that point, you know, in
terms of actually initial distribution of coins, as far as
I know, I haven't heard of any better ways to do it fairly
this. The proof of work.
So speaking of this like initial distribution and issuance so I
guess two part question here. One is, you know, this issuance
mechanism. You know, you guys have an
experiment, like a new monetary policy that I haven't seen it.
I've known the other coin. I've seen this like similar
monetary policy and is Dogecoin, but essentially this idea of
Unlimited Supply where it's but constant issuance, so it's like,
you know, you have this like, it's fun, like little time is
money meme going on where it's like 11 grin per Canon or 60
Grand per minute and but until the end of time, so like there's
no fixed cap. Like there is in like Bitcoin,
or like coin, or any of these other money currencies that are
trying to become base money, for example, and so, kind of what
led you down to what what who made that decision of like
trying this new policy as to how I think.
It's something that the team arrived at actually fairly early
on in development. When we're talking about various
models and schedules, I've how to do this.
I think most importantly, okay, a few things, I mean, this is a
big can of worms and you get all sorts of hate mail for any time
you start talking about this. The model that came up
originally by Satoshi in Bitcoin.
As in there were going to be a fixed number of Bitcoins.
It's going to be an entirely deflation area system.
That's, that's great to know. There seems to be a wide help.
Widely held belief out there that this was handed down to him
on a tablet. From God.
At some point in, this is the way it should be for all time.
There's a lot of problems with that approach and you've seen
that in Bitcoin. Everybody seen this with the
hyper deflation that you see in Bitcoin.
Now, you know, the paper said, was supposed to be a digital
cash and it's turned into a store of value and that's the
story now so that approach is quite problematic.
The other thing is nobody yet knows whether a fee Market on
its own is going to be enough to secure a network when the fees
from Bitcoin become too low. So we, we think that the
approach we've taken, which is just a constant block
commission, 60 grams per block, once a minute forever and by.
And by the way, this This is actually quite conservative as
far as putting a currency out there.
I mean the inflation rate becomes 0 you know 30 years on
and you're barely making an imagined.
If you can only print 60 US dollars a minute like you'd have
hyper deflation. You know, this is actually a
rather conservative approach and you know it is, it is new and
the cryptocurrency world. I don't think it's that radical.
I think it's easy to understand. I think it will.
It will help secure the network when fees run out, it will help.
It will help people to use Grim as as money as opposed to
hoarding it because they're afraid is going to be worth far
more tomorrow. So yeah.
So that's that's kind of where we're can't speak for the entire
team. With that's basically where we
stand on it at this point. And ultimately this is very
simple, right? It's very, very easy, to
explain. Very easy to understand, it's
hard to kind of I haven't seen a lot of arguments as you know,
Well constructed as to why it is a problem and since then it is
you know, very simple structure. We like it.
It's elegant, right. Yeah.
You know, I think this whole time is money, meme.
I think actually it will work. I think it's easy to explain
and, you know, I think there's a lot it'll be very interesting to
see how this farestart plays out like, you know.
But I don't think we've, I think the last time we saw something
similar to a fair star, but clearly not, as fair was like
this, he cash start. And even that was you know, they
Have their whole like developer fun side of things.
But, you know, and I remember like, what happened when I
remember my roommate, my ex-roommate.
She like, no, it's really hyped about the grand Mining.
And I know like there was like, I don't know.
I've heard a crazy figures about like, VCS, like putting hundreds
of millions of dollars or something into, I don't know
that much but crazy amounts of money into like, you know,
mining Ventures very early on in Grand when it like, started with
zero Supply. So It'll be very interesting to
see how this new farestart and issuance mechanism works out.
So now that we're kind of drawing towards the close of the
episode. No.
Just want to talk. Maybe ask a few one or two
questions, a little bit about know, a bit about the future of
grain and what the future roadmap is and whatnot.
And so, one of the questions that, you know, often comes up
about grain, is that in order to make this memo wimble, Feature
work, we kind of had to remove Bitcoin script Because, you
know, you can't it's not part, it doesn't work with
aggregation. And so, how will we, what is the
plan here for? You know, does this mean that
you know, is it possible to do? Multi cigs on undrained?
Will it be possible to do H TLC's Atomic swaps?
Is any of this possible on the road map?
Absolutely. As a matter of fact, Atomic
swaps with both. Are you want and Bitcoin have
been done before? Multisig is definitely, it's
possible. We know how to It just, I don't
think it's been implemented in the code, but to be certainly
have kind of the foundation in there to do that other stuff,
you know, smart contracts, we've talked about script descriptive
it. Those are essentially ways of
kind of enforcing unfortunate, the usual conditions you'd be
enforcing in a contract without having to have a contract in
particular in place. So, yeah, they're definitely
possible. I won't say we have the answers
to all of them at this point. There's certainly a lot of
research outstanding and if you kind of look through our site
and what we have there, You know there's a there's a list there
of technologies that we're looking into and researching how
to do this. And yeah that's basically the
future in the future is going to be for us will be, you know,
building the tool to support community building on top of
grin and on top of member wimble as well as you know, slow and
steady research as to you know other Technologies become
important in here again like Atomic swaps Spirits some you
know lightning like Network on top of that.
So yeah that's that's It's kind of very briefly what our future
looks like. And so back to that question
about the Fair start and like, you know, so does he cash team
with their Fair start? They funded themselves by giving
themselves a like a developer cut of all the block Awards, you
know, Satoshi funded his Fair start by like, you know, do it
like mining like crazy when like Bitcoin first came out and
because it just wasn't very popular.
But like I said, you know, lots of outside money.
I was poured into grin mining from very early on.
And so, what is the funding model here?
Now, for the grin developers, how is this going to be
sustainable? There's no pre mind nothing like
that. So, Grim is 100% Community
funded we live by. I mean, Michael is funded
through donations. The there is a debt fund and a
security audit fund the raise donations for for specific
purposes. But Relies 100% on donations
from the community and from from Miners and other companies
active in the space to contribute.
And and I think, you know, you touched upon a very important
thing there that, yeah, you know, hot, what is fair and, and
you know what is, what is a fair launched and I think green is,
has probably been one of the more first launches that have
been around because it's simply because of the fact that, you
know, it had a lot of attention. Lot of eyeballs on it from day
one, which a lot of other projects really didn't have
including Bitcoin early on and you know, equal opportunity
doesn't mean equal outcome and you know, we welcome anybody to
come in mind, you know, whether the Reese's or not or whether
their users, and whether it, welcome any, any anybody to come
and participate in the project, and that's the strength, I think
it's the reason why I got involved, you know, a year ago,
because it's very easy. Participate is very easy to
become active in the community, when there's nobody else kind of
making, you know, having an advantage of you earning more
money or something because of your contribution, anybody who's
here and want to contribute is actually just doing that because
they believe in the project and they want to do so.
And, and, and that makes it very easy for new people to come in,
come in and get involved. It becomes also a self-selection
exercise. I noticed like, we have a great
community and I think part of it is because there's no
get-rich-quick scheme here. And you know, we don't have to
pay people to do the work, it takes care of itself and
ultimately, as well, you know, I'm not some people ask, you
know, there's always this kind of quick questions.
Is that the right way? Is the sustainable, will it
last? And so on, well, it's completely
up to the community, right? If nobody wants to fund us then,
you know, maybe maybe there will be fewer development developers
unless development going on, if nobody cares about that, but I
guess it wasn't very popular in the first place, but if people
do care, About that. And they want to actually take a
grin forward, then anybody can participate in do that.
So it's like a it's like a non-issue for me in a way.
So you don't see any issues with.
I mean I can see how this story right now is super peeling this.
Oh, it's Wind currently, no one actually makes huge amounts of
monies building businesses on grin, but once they're actually
active people who actively benefit from the grid Network
and build business on businesses on it.
Do you think the the volunteers will still be there to actually
build the infrastructure where they feel exploited?
And with us turned into a tragedy of the commons
situation. I don't know.
I think, I think it depends a little bit.
I think it, but I think it depends on the businesses, how
they act in the community. What what kind of how they
operate as you know, if I was starting a business, you know,
wondering you know the stuff we're doing for example, with
with green box and Baltimore, 32 all fully open for anybody to
use. If you're a business and you
make money off grid, it's kind of in your interest to
contribute to the default, right?
Because you know it's your protocol that you making money
from. So it kind of makes sense for
you to ensure that somebody's looking The protocol the
protocol level. So for what we're seeing is that
exchanges mining pools, you know, proof-of-work, mining
software providers are contributing and they're making
contributions. I can't say whether it's going
to be enough or not. It's very early days we'll see
about that but you know it really is up to everybody else
everybody involved to actually put excuse me to contribute and
and I don't I'm not too worried about it and and then you know,
just because there are companies that there that make money,
right? We saw they should be doing that
if they're offering value to the community, that shouldn't
preclude Community member to to contribute if they want to on
their spare time, on something else, some other corner of the
of the protocol but the difference is I guess with other
setups is that if we for example as developers we're taking
twenty percent tax on all coins. Ever mind that creates this very
weird relationship between us and the rest of the community.
Right? Because it's also something we
have a stake in improving the value of the coin which is not
necessarily what is in the interest of the community.
Right? We we suddenly if we get 20% of
all the coins then it's really in our interest to just raise
the price of the coin all the time and the kind of focus on
that whereas maybe what we should be looking at is adoption
or you know, getting it making more users using the coin that
doesn't necessarily drive up the price of the coin.
Do you see what I mean? It kind of has like, a weird.
Assertive alignment. Yeah, I agree that it's really
difficult to find Morris that in Center that the line incentives.
Well, but saying at you trust in the good in companies to me that
that seems it didn't Eve. I mean, if you look at the off
chain word, for instance, Apple massively bills on public
infrastructure and applicant only exist because there are
structures. Structures that preceded it like
the the judicial system and the road infrastructure and the
internet but other major corporations have ways of
circumventing paying tax and and I mean they in principle they're
liable to pay tax but somehow they still end up paying very
little or close to not know taxes, right?
I mean I can't comment on that. I can't comment on whether apple
pays a lot of tax for not, but but I guess the point is that
generally speaking, the whole purpose is green as a project
was to be very minimal on the like the top layer protocol.
Right, in order for that to kind of make sense intuitively.
It means that, you know, other entities, underneath need to
kind of step up to the plate and deliver products and services to
help to facilitate that because it's very minimal of the top
layer because it's very minimal the top layer.
It shouldn't be needing. 20% of all the coins of my mind to
sustain itself, right? It's the whole that's the kind
of the whole idea of it. I appreciate the idea and I
think it's super idealistic and I really hope it works.
So I'm not holding against you. I'm just, yeah, I'm just, I'm
just asking whether your work and I also like, you know,
companies that can approach us and they kind of say, hey, we
want to get involved. We want to do this, want to do
that. How can we do?
How can we get more involved in Grid?
And I say that like if you contribute to the community that
fund, The greatest way to create Goodwill and add in marketing
for your company in, in the community right by just kind of
making active contributions. And of course, companies can
choose not to do that. But mean that stands for
themselves and I know, you know, I understand that you might
think it sounds idealistic or naive, but I actually don't
think there's a better way to do this.
I don't think it's better to crew to stop.
It's like a death tax or something.
I don't think that's gonna lead to longer term success.
For grain and what its long-term objectives are.
If you start off with a Dev talks and that's how you're
going to fund, then you will always be painted with
developers to work on the chain for those reasons like, why am I
going to put my time into make someone else to have someone
else profit off the end of it? I know it kind of sounds a bit
naive and there seems to be I've seen criticism of the internet
again. No it's not going to work
because you need to pay developer, but I think we've
it's been around for two years now.
The interest is still growing personally.
I'm I mean, I've been funded for for the past year and unfunded
again for the next next six or seven months to work on a
full-time in order at a regular developer salary.
And I think, and this is early days.
I said before the chamber's even launched in people had their
businesses that they were going to build on top of great.
So I think the early signs are encouraging anyhow.
I think what we're seeing with exact exchanges is an example,
right? We're not actually.
I mean we welcome and encourage all exchanges to to list us that
want to and if they have questions will help them and so
on but we're not really chasing exchanges.
We're not applying for exchanges, we're not filling out
any documents, there's no legal entity, nobody can give any
money for listing fees or anything to exchanges, because
we're broke, we don't have any money, right?
So instead of changes list us without us asking and without
any preconditions, but we had like a pot of gold.
That we were sitting on which was like equating to a chunk of
the total coins, mind the head, think the story would have been
very different. Yeah.
So I mean, and certainly they have been open source projects
that have been going on for tens of years and they're still
around. So I'm interested to see what
the future holds for you guys. Thank you for coming on.
Thank you for having us. Thank you very much.
Thank you for joining us on this week's episode.
We release new episodes every week.
You can find And subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify,
YouTube SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcast.
And if you have a Google home or Alexa device, you can tell it to
listen to the latest episode of the epicenter podcast, but
epicenter, .t V, / subscribe for a full list of places where you
can watch and listen, while you're there, be sure to sign up
for the newsletter so you get new episodes in your inbox as
they're released if you want to interact with us guests or other
podcast listeners, you can Us on Twitter and please leave us a
review on iTunes. It helps to be Poncho and we're
always happy to be there but thanks so much and we look
forward to being back next year. Us on Twitter and please leave
us a review on iTunes. It helps to be Poncho and we're
always happy to be there but thanks so much and we look
forward to being back next year.