Grin News #4: Jul 09, 2018

Testnet 3 is live. New Mimblewimble project. Dandelion talk.

News

• Testnet 3 was released yesterday.

• Dandelion talk from Building on Bitcoin. (via @quentinlesceller)

• Crash course in Mimblewimble offered as part of Tari Labs University.

• @quentinlesceller visited the SF Cryptocurrency Devs meetup in San Francisco to talk about Mimblewimble, Grin, and Dandelion.

Dev

• Testnet 3 main improvements are covered in @yeastplume’s weekly update.

• Gitter dev meeting from Tuesday last week.

• Discussion on Initial Difficulty Adjustment for T3.

• PR#1228: Fixing a bug where txhashset extension errors were being silently dropped.

On the forum & Gitter

• More discussions on Governance.

• @tromp and @photon brainstorming solutions that would kill off lean mining.

Projects

• BEAM, another implementation of Mimblewimble. (via @alexanderliegl_twitter) From position paper, Telegram group, and Grin Gitter:

  • Written in C++ from scratch.

  • Blocks are mined using Equihash PoW.

  • Emission rate using “periodic halving”.

  • No ICO.

  • 20% of all block mining rewards for the first five years goes to the Beam Growth Pool to incentivise development and promotion. The UTXOs for these are pre-generated as part of the Genesis block, and are time-locked to become available gradually at certain block heights.

  • Public Testnet launch in September (upon which code will be released, it’s currently closed sourced).

  Beam’s CTO Alex Romanov dropped by the Grin Gitter several times to answer questions from the Grin community:

  • On Beam’s purpose and general info about their team and some of their considerations.

  • On how Beam Growth Pool allocation is implemented.

  • On how they intend to handle the P2P communication layer.

• Grinpool.us (incomplete) source code released by @bladedoyle. Contributions are welcomed.

• GrinScan block explorer updated to work on Testnet3.

Research

• Schnorr Sig BIP. (via @tromp)

Upcoming Events

• Aug 1, London: The 2nd London meetup. Present your Grin-related projects.

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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-at-lehnberg.net or find me on Gitter.