phyro

People tend to forget Bitcoin is a monetary experiment where nobody controls the printer and the total supply over time converges to a certain value. There's no good reason not to try a different model of supply e.g. a supply function that emulates a clock. An asset like this could be named TIME and a coin could represent a second that passed in real life. Valuing time as money would make for an interesting experiment.

That's not the only difference. As tromp said, if someone figured out the discrete log of H, they could inflate Monero and nobody would be able to tell. If someone inflated Bitcoin, everyone would notice immediately.

The protocol you linked is noninteractive. The user simply creates an onion-based transaction and sends it to the service. The service collects these and creates a single joint transaction which includes your output.

If you're interested in a non-technical explanation of Mimblewimble, I tried to explain it through pictures here https://phyro.github.io/what-is-grin/mimblewimble.html

Monero has some strong points, but it's actually LESS decentralized than Bitcoin. A Monero confidential transaction is 1.5kb while a Bitcoin transaction which is only around 300 bytes. For the argument of decentralization, it doesn't matter that it doesn't blind the amounts or add decoys inputs, the 5x size of a transaction itself means that the chain is much bigger than Bitcoin under the same load which makes it less decentralized due to much higher storage requirements for a full node. It's also much slower to verify the history because of all the rangeproofs that need to be validated for all outputs that have been ever created.

It seems to me the threat model of Rust is a magnitude safer than that of Bitcoin under assumption that Bitcoin was to become a global store of wealth. Toxicity acts as a shield to protect against social attacks from the big players which may try to, in some way, capture control of the network or influence its direction. And there are very good incentives to try and do that. It's also why it's important for the protocol to ossify over time and become even more conservative. Rust, as well as the vast majority of open source communities, doesn't really need that these levels of toxicity to survive in the long run because the attack vectors aren't on the same level (although still very important to deflect attacks because there are other incentives in play). At least it seems to me to be this way, I'll gladly listen to a counter-argument.

There's also something to be said about extreme design simplicity and resilience to change. Bitcoin is already really good at this, but when the system design is so simple that any change looks invasive, it ossifies even sooner and makes changes even less likely. Removing opportunities for discussion (e.g. scripting support and opcode discussions) also removes opportunity for conflicts regarding a protocol feature. Simpler design may come at the cost of slightly less expressivity, but at the benefit of being naturally more resilient to change.

Glad to hear that. In Grin, each block creates 60 coins. The time to mine a block is set to be 1 minute on average, so it will average out as 60 coins each minute and hence 1 coin per second. This won't be _exact_ of course due to the variance in block times so you definitely can't count on that - just like you can't count on Bitcoin getting exactly 24*6 blocks each day. But these systems are defined such that if the blocks start coming in too fast, they make them come slower and if they are coming in too slow, they make sure to make the puzzle easier to solve so the blocks can come faster. I think this follows the models they have good enough.

I'm glad you mentioned this. Indeed, there are two different things. First is the linearity of blocks and the second is the linearity of the emission of units with which we transact. Bitcoin has the former, but does not have the latter. You can't unambiguously say "I'm going to buy an hour of Bitcoin" because this hour depends on _when_ you plan on buying them - the emission over any time interval (including one hour) changes over time due to the halvings. This is why I think coins with a constant emission (especially Grin where 1 coin is emitted every second) can bring to life the saying "time is money" because money becomes time. There is no difference between calling your 100 Grins "100 Seconds" and buying an hour of Grin. So yes, you're correct that the article talks about the "block time", but I think this can be pushed further where you not only have a global clock for events, but your unit of money is time itself.

P.S. I prefer thinking of a blockchain as a "drunk" clock, because of the variance that comes with the finding of a valid PoW. It might sway a bit left and right, but it mostly goes in the straight line in the end.

If you zoom in enough, you won't see these exponential steps. If you were able to zoom out completely, you'd see _only_ the exponential function. Bitcoin's emission is an exponential function (dropping exponentially), the fact that there is some time period between these exponential steps does not make it non-exponential. This would have been obvious if the halvings were every 30 minutes, but it's much less obvious when the "in-between step interval" is 4 years.

Thank you for sharing this! I wrote a much shorter article on why I believe Grin is the closest to "time is money" here https://phyro.github.io/what-is-grin/grin_emission.html

Bitcoin can be thought of as a clock, but the unit that is being transfered can't be thought as time because for it to be mappable to time, you need a linear function and Bitcoin's emission is exponential because of the halvings.

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?

A 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!