Mimblewimble and Grin Are Different
phyro.github.ioA little over a year ago I heard of a technology called Mimblewimble. I skimmed over some explanations and somewhat understood what it was trying to achieve. I've been in the space a few years and I've not been this excited about any other project in the space. It was without a doubt the single most interesting idea I've encoutered. By far. I soon joined the community and continued learning about its inner workings. During the learning process, I soon realized that there are very few in the Grin community, and outside of it, that understand the underlying idea. This was surprising to me because unlike all the alternative technologies that aim to improve privacy, Mimblewimble, specifically the Grin implementation, was designed to be extremely simple. In fact, I'd argue that it's the only technology that has a simpler design than Bitcoin!
I'm convinced the idea stands out among all the other ideas in the space (at least the ones I've seen). It's very hard to find a design that fits this nicely together. A few days ago, I've decided to write a short series of posts that try to present the idea to the wider audience. In order to reach the average crypto Joe, I avoided talking about the underlying cryptographic primitives because they would only confuse people. They're also not important to understand the idea underneath.
Most privacy technologies make certain tradeoffs and Mimblewimble is one of them, but I promise you that if you take the time and try to understand it, you'll at the very least learn something new and appreciate the idea.
I hope you guys enjoy the read and if you find it interesting, consider joining the Grin communication channels.
https://phyro.github.io/what-is-grin/
Happy new year and all the best in 2021. Cheers!
Thanks for writing this; it definitely helped me understand MimbleWimble better. Unfortunately Grin looks fairly dead and scalability improvements in Zcash may eliminate Grin's remaining benefits.
You must be looking in the wrong places to think Grin is dead. Grin is about to undergo a significant upgrade in its 4th pre-planned hardfork [1] in about 2 weeks, has an active forum [2], and live chat groups [3] in addition to telegram and discord channels, and a weekly newsletter [4].
Meanwhile, Zcash is far from challenging Grin's benefits of lacking a mining tax (recently extended from the original 4 years to 8 years), having a simple long term viable emission, relying on far simpler and better understood cryptography, and an order of magnitude smaller chainsize for the same amount of transactions.
Not to mention that about 99% of all ZCash transactions lack any privacy, and still rely on a trusted setup to prevent hidden inflation.
It seems easier for Grin to reduce input-output linkability and thereby erode ZCash' single remaining benefit.
[1] https://forum.grin.mw/t/grin-v5-0-0-network-upgrade-hard-for...
I'm glad you found it useful! I wouldn't say Grin is dead, the early years were designed to be tough on the price. There's definitely places where it can improve, especially in the usability. I know that Grin can do a few tricks e.g. accumulate the kernels into a single point after they have been validated, the caveat though is that this does not improve initial sync and a node doing so can't seed new nodes. But it allows for running a fully validating node on a mobile for many years.
Could you explain a bit the Zcash scalability improvements?