Grin's launch sparked debate among Bitcoin developers: Is fairness the biggest innovation?

In the previous article about grin, the author briefly introduced grin and the MimbleWimble protocol behind it. After the grin mainnet was launched yesterday, its magical power attracted the attention of many big-name developers, including Bitcoin core developer Jameson Lopp, Bitcoin chief maintainer Wladimir van der Laan, the father of smart contracts Nick Szabo, and bitcoin.org administrator Cøbra, who is known as the cobra.

This article collects these developers' views on grin, including supporters and opponents such as Luke Dashjr.

Supporters' voices

The first person to express support for grin was the popular Bitcoin developer Jameson Lopp, who posted the phrase “Running grin” on Twitter, seemingly paying tribute to Hal Finney.

This tweet was also liked by Nick Szabo, the father of smart contracts. In addition, Wladimir van der Laan, the current chief maintainer of the Bitcoin code base, also said that he would try to run grin. He replied:

” > Trust > Despite great adversity, J.K. Rowling created it. (I’ll give it a try, too) ”

Cøbra, the administrator of bitcoin.org, did not hide his optimism about grin. He said:

“Grin is easily the most advanced and fascinating cryptocurrency since Bitcoin. It’s interesting that the Bitcoin diehards have come up with the logic to convince themselves to accept this low value cryptocurrency. Personally, I’m a diehard fan and I’ll be buying a lot.”

Opponents' voices

Of course, not everyone is optimistic about grin, a new cryptocurrency. Some netizens questioned Jameson Lopp:

“Why would a Bitcoin lover like you tolerate a shitcoin like grin?”

Jameson responded:

“Because it offers no additional incentives to the creators, which is actually innovating, it’s a pretty good cypherpunk project.”

Bitcoin enthusiast John Carvalho disagrees with this view. His tweet "Don't run grin" also attracted a like from Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr, which shows that they are not optimistic about grin.

Some netizens also made a funny picture satirizing grin.

(Photo from: Elon Moist カエル)

Is the lack of an upper limit a fatal flaw?

In the previous article, I wrote about the issuance rules of grin. The issuance rate of 60 tokens per minute will continue. In theory, this is a cryptocurrency with no upper limit. Because of this rule, grin has been criticized by many people. In fact, when grin develops to the later stage, its annual inflation rate will drop to 2% or even below 1%, which can be ignored. This is different from the inflation rules of legal currency.

The author believes that this is a very interesting currency experiment, and based on the current development situation, this experiment has developed in a positive direction, with more and more developers spontaneously participating in this experiment, which is something that other blockchain project parties cannot do even if they spend money. Of course, the author still maintains the view mentioned in the previous article: it is suitable to participate in grin mining now, but not suitable to buy its tokens in the secondary market (the current market price is around US$30).