#26: A&A = LOL đľď¸ââď¸
Covering Dec 3-9 2018
Comparisons are often made between code and law, with the argument that software development isnât 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. âď¸
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 yâall there.
The âBitcoin Maximalistâs Gradient of Acceptance of Crypto Assetsâ, as tweeted by Alex Sunnarborg.
Grin coverage in an article on BTCManager.com.
More coverage was fund on Bitcoinexchangeguide.com
âŚand another article on Coinannouncer.com.
Csilla Brimer included Grin in a list of privacy preserving tech.
Governance
Notes from last weekâs 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.Â
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 Grinâs blockchain size in relation to Bitcoin.
And the otherwise fairly dormant grin subreddit saw some action when Grinâs transactions per seconds were debated. To all readers: Forks are imminent. If youâre planning to fork Grin, please send redditor âNumeccaâ a DM, they are on the lookout for them, apparently.
Projects
wallet713 is a new open-source wallet thatâs using Grinbox to facilitate transaction building and aims to make it easy to send, store, and swap Grin.
(Full disclosure: Iâm part of the team working on it.)
Upcoming events
Jan 8, London, UK: Grin London Meetup Â
Jan 28, San Mateo, CA:Â Grincon(0)<US>. Registrations are open. Get your tickets early so you donât miss out.
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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.