News

• ByteSize Capital read our expectation of ~1M GPUs for the Genesis block as an “estimate” and called Grin either the “most obvious” or “most crowded” trade of 2019. Or both perhaps? Glad someone is reading the meeting notes at least. 🕵️‍♂️

• Coindesk reveals that Amir Taaki, creator of libbitcoin and DarkWallet, has built a wallet that supports “Mimblewimble”.

• @askepios discovered an Augur prediction market on whether Grin’s market cap would exceed $500m within the next 6 months. @tromp offers convincing analysis on why this would be unlikely in-thread.

• @jaspervdm interviewed by BitcoinWednesday.

• Zooko tweets in support of donations to Grin’s security audit.

• RIP Tim May, author of the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto and Cyphernomicon. Relevant HackerNews discussion.

Dev

• There are 119 open issues in Grin. 

• 29 pull requests were merged in the past week, with 8 unique contributors.

• Notes from the last developer meeting. ‘Floonet’, what is intended to be the permanent betanet, is launching in the next couple of days. It’s essentially a dry run of mainnet launch, practicing the genesis block release process.

• Bitcoin StackExchange discussion on tradeoffs between privacy and implementation complexity of Dandelion.

• Daira raising security concerns with Dual PoW approach on the Zcash forums.

• Progress being made on Switch Commitments.

• Next bi-weekly developer meeting is scheduled for Tuesday Dec 25 @ 15:00 UTC in grin/Dev on Gitter. You can add topics to the agenda.

Governance

• The next bi-weekly governance meeting is scheduled for Tomorrow Tuesday Dec 18 @ 15:00 UTC in grin/Lobby on Gitter. You can add topics to the agenda.

• We’ll be discussing possible Mission statements. Come and join the fun

Community

• More emission rate debate on the forum.

• @bladedoyle published how-to’s for CPU and also GPU mining on MWGrinPool.

Research

• Dan Boneh, Benedikt Bünz & co dropped yet another bombshell paper, this time on Universal Accumulators. Discussion ensued trying to make sense of it and the potential implications.

Upcoming events

• Jan 8, London, UK: Grin London Meetup  

• Jan 28, San Mateo, CA: Grincon(0)<US>. Registrations are open. Get your tickets early so you don’t miss out.

URL to share this article: https://grinnews.substack.com/p/27-betanet-launch-imminent-

This newsletter is curated by Daniel Lehnberg. Any views expressed are personal and do not represent an official position of the Grin project.

Got news or articles you would like to include? Any feedback or other suggestions? drop me a line on daniel.lehnberg-at-protonmail.com or find me on Gitter.

Comparisons are often made between code and law, with the argument that software development isn’t that different from writing legal texts. If this holds true, then the Australian Government is well on their way to push some really buggy code to production with their Assistance & Access law. This ProtonMail blog post sums the problem up quite nicely, and this tweetstorm illustrates how out of touch the Aussie lawmakers seem to be from the realities of development. Good luck making this work in practice. ✌️

Governments around the world are shouting louder and louder for encryption backdoors. If there ever was a question as to why privacy projects are better developed in a distributed fashion without a legal entity to subpoena or harass in the courts of a particular jurisdiction, developments such as these may provide convincing answers. Of course, being distributed does not prevent individual contributors from being coerced by their governments to put in backdoors in projects, but being open source should (hopefully) make such efforts more difficult to go unnoticed.

Interesting times ahead.

/ Daniel

News

• In other news, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security published a pre-solicitation notice asking for ideas on how to conduct blockchain analysis on privacy coins.

• @yeastplume went on the What Bitcoin Did podcast to talk about Grin.

• The 3rd London Meetup was announced. See y’all there.

• The ‘Bitcoin Maximalist’s Gradient of Acceptance of Crypto Assets’, as tweeted by Alex Sunnarborg.

• Grin coverage in an article on BTCManager.com.

• More coverage was fund on Bitcoinexchangeguide.com

• …and another article on Coinannouncer.com.

• Csilla Brimer included Grin in a list of privacy preserving tech.

Governance

• Notes from last week’s Governance meeting are up. Quarkslab to be approached for the security audit of the Grin crates, and we have another security auditor looking at the libsecp256k fork in parallel.

• We have a new project website design. Could use some love on content and the new design might need some tweaks. Feel free to submit a PR against the repo.

• The next bi-weekly governance meeting is scheduled for Tuesday Dec 18 @ 15:00 UTC in grin/Lobby on Gitter. You can add topics to the agenda.

Dev

• There are 118 open issues in Grin. 

• 26 pull requests were merged in the past week, with 7 unique contributors.

• Transaction building is now supported via Keybase, courtesy of @mcdallas.

• Grin is now on Rust 2018, migrated over via @hashmap.

• @tromp & @phooton did some bug squashing on a weird RTX-series only CUDA bug.

• Next bi-weekly developer meeting is scheduled for Tomorrow Tuesday Dec 11 @ 15:00 UTC in grin/Dev on Gitter. You can add topics to the agenda.

Community

• Forum thread on Grin’s blockchain size in relation to Bitcoin.

• And the otherwise fairly dormant grin subreddit saw some action when Grin’s transactions per seconds were debated. To all readers: Forks are imminent. If you’re planning to fork Grin, please send redditor “Numecca” a DM, they are on the lookout for them, apparently.

Projects

• wallet713 is a new open-source wallet that’s using Grinbox to facilitate transaction building and aims to make it easy to send, store, and swap Grin.
  (Full disclosure: I’m part of the team working on it.)

Upcoming events

• Jan 8, London, UK: Grin London Meetup  

• Jan 28, San Mateo, CA: Grincon(0)<US>. Registrations are open. Get your tickets early so you don’t miss out.

URL to share this article: https://grinnews.substack.com/p/26-a-and-a-lol-

This newsletter is curated by Daniel Lehnberg. Any views expressed are personal and do not represent an official position of the Grin project.

Got news or articles you would like to include? Any feedback or other suggestions? drop me a line on daniel.lehnberg-at-protonmail.com or find me on Gitter.

News

• Shout-out to @Erikcason on twitter for his offer to match Grin Security fund donations.  

• Andreas Antonopoulos on whether governments will let privacy coins exist.

• Jordan Clifford wrote an overview of Mimblewimble.

Dev

• There are 111 open issues in Grin. 

• 28 pull requests were merged in the past week, with 8 unique contributors.

• The notes from the last developer meeting. Mainnet planning, Windows support, and a formalised Pull Request review process were some of the topics covered.

• A second implementation of Grin was announced. @DavidBurkett is working on a C++ node and hoping to have it ready for mainnet.

• @yeastplume’s weekly update.

• The scheduled T4 Hard Fork took place at block height 64,000, with the first Cuckaroo block being mined over the weekend.

• Issue #2053: Genesis release process & script

• Research on Wallet API v2.

• Next bi-weekly developer meeting is scheduled for Tuesday Dec 11 @ 15:00 UTC in grin/Dev on Gitter. You can add topics to the agenda.

Governance

• The next bi-weekly governance meeting is scheduled for Tomorrow Tuesday Dec 4 @ 15:00 UTC in grin/Lobby on Gitter. You can add topics to the agenda.

Mining

• GPU Mining Stats is being collected for various setups. Contribute with your stats as well.

• GrinGoldMiner for (mostly) Windows is working again after the hard fork.

Projects

• TMGOX have added festive holiday jumpers and other swag in the store. Check it out.

Upcoming events

• Dec 5, Amsterdam: Bitcoin Wednesday #66. @jaspervdm has been invited to speak about Grin.

• Jan 28, San Mateo, CA: Grincon(0)<US>. Registrations are open. Get your tickets early so you don’t miss out.

URL to share this article: https://grinnews.substack.com/p/25-grin-in-c-

This newsletter is curated by Daniel Lehnberg. Any views expressed are personal and do not represent an official position of the Grin project.

Got news or articles you would like to include? Any feedback or other suggestions? drop me a line on daniel.lehnberg-at-protonmail.com or find me on Gitter.

News

• grincon(0)<US> website is up: Jan 28 2019, San Mateo CA.

• Tari Labs published a comparison between Grin and Beam, and also an analysis on some of the design choice criticisms Grin has received. Unfortunately both articles contain factual inaccuracies. It nevertheless feels as an earnest effort to be balanced and informative, something we cannot get enough of in this space. The Tari team reached out to say that they welcome corrections, so feel free to submit pull requests to them so the content can become up to date and more accurate.

Governance

• Notes from the last Governance meeting are up, and it was a big one. Some highlights:

  • Mainnet launch target set to Jan 15, 2019;

  • Security Audit fund raising is closing Nov 30 (please donate), Grin will do incremental audits;

  • The ASIC Friendly POW for launch was relaxed to Cuckatoo31;

  • Genesis block release planning.

• The next bi-weekly governance meeting is scheduled for Tuesday Dec 4 @ 15:00 UTC in grin/Lobby on Gitter. You can add topics to the agenda.

Dev

• There are 111 open issues in Grin. 

• 15 pull requests were merged in the past week, with 6 unique contributors.

• @yeastplume’s weekly update. Wallet plugins have been merged, as has BIP-39 “mnemonic seed” support.

• #1997: Cuckaroo T4 Hard fork, scheduled to take place block at height 64,000.

• Next bi-weekly developer meeting is scheduled for Tomorrow Nov 27 @ 15:00 UTC in grin/Dev on Gitter. You can add topics to the agenda.

Research

• How-to: Setting up a USB Armory key with Grin Wallet.

• Programmable constraint systems for bulletproofs.

Projects

• @bladedoyle announcing MWGrinpool, the first open-source Grin mining pool.

URL to share this article: https://grinnews.substack.com/p/24-jan-15-2019-

This newsletter is curated by Daniel Lehnberg. Any views expressed are personal and do not represent an official position of the Grin project.

Got news or articles you would like to include? Any feedback or other suggestions? drop me a line on daniel.lehnberg-at-protonmail.com or find me on Gitter.

News

• Grincon is coming to California on January 28 2019. Save the date. More info to follow.

• Quentin & Blockcypher published an introduction to Grin’s Proof of Work.

• The Promise Miner/Protocol –“The first quantum-resistant, privacy preserving, credit reputation and payments network for business”, forked Grin, and is using it to run their testnet.

• Coinmine.com wants to make crypto mining easy, and is using Grin to promote their miners that draw “less power than a PlayStation”. Interesting team and group of investors. Unclear if/how their 4GB AMD GPU will be applied to actually mine Grin.

• Zooko finds Grin’s approach to PoW ‘encouraging’. 

Governance

• The next bi-weekly governance meeting is scheduled for Tomorrow Nov 20 @ 15:00 UTC in grin/Lobby on Gitter. You can add topics to the agenda.

• A launch date for Mainnet is among the things to be discussed in the meeting tomorrow.

Dev

• There are 113 open issues in Grin. 

• 30 pull requests were merged in the past week, with 9 unique contributors.

• Notes from the latest Dev meeting. Scheduled hard fork pushed one week, plugins, pow, and mainnet planning.

• @yeastplume’s weekly update covers the work he’s kicked off to introduce the notion of ‘wallet plugins’, making it easy to integrate new communication methods for transaction building with the wallet.

• @tromp ran the first cuckaroo cycle ever, our ASIC-resistant proof of work. Coming soon (tm) to you through a scheduled hard fork.

• At the same time, @tromp has also been researching the feasibility for Cuckatoo32 to be the ASIC-friendly proof of work.

• Next bi-weekly developer meeting is scheduled for Tuesday Nov 27 @ 15:00 UTC in grin/Dev on Gitter. You can add topics to the agenda.

Design

• There is now a dedicated /design channel on Gitter. Don’t be a stranger.

• We’ve also set up an organisation in Figma. Feel free to reach out to me if you want to be included.

Research

• Confidential Assets discussed on the forum.

Projects

• @mcdallas ported Gringotts to Rust.

URL to share this article: https://grinnews.substack.com/p/23-california-love-

This newsletter is curated by Daniel Lehnberg. Any views expressed are personal and do not represent an official position of the Grin project.

Got news or articles you would like to include? Any feedback or other suggestions? drop me a line on daniel.lehnberg-at-protonmail.com or find me on Gitter.