Daniel Lehnberg & Michael Cordner: Grin – Cypherpunk Mimblewimble

This episode of epicenter is brought to you by Microsoft Azure and figure and deploy a Consortium blockchain Network in just a few clicks with pre-built configurations, and enterprise-grade infrastructure, spend less time on blocking scaffolding, and more time building your application to learn more visit. It's a Ka, dot Ms, / epicenter. Black-and-white episodes episode 278 with Michael Jordan and Daniel, mpeg-2 cool developers from the grid implementation of

the member window protocol. I am pitted against my name is Sonia Agarwal and so like, Freddy Krueger mentioned, today we have two of the developers from grin. You know, I kind of greatness is very interesting project that has a very interesting background.

Sorry that will get into today and you know, I kind of heard about them very early on and there, you know, Creation with the member window protocol first came out and kind of ignored it for a while and then in the last couple months like you know it just suddenly gained a lot of adoption. They launched very recently just last month.

In January. There were like I think probably the few projects who announced a launch date and actually met their launch deadlines which as you know, are very cool. And just you know one disclaimer is I am currently actively mining grin so just a little bit of a disclaimer there Lexa jump into the episode. Today on epicenter, we have on

with us Michael corner. And Daniel Lindbergh to of the core developers of the grin blockchain which implements this very interesting protocol called member limbal. And so, you know, throughout the epicenter, you know, we've briefly touched on member Wendel here and there a lot of like, you know, we've had Adam back on before and Gregg Maxwell and they've like slightly touched on member. Wendel mentioned it in passing as like, you know, future

scaling options. But you know, we never really got a chance to Fully Deep dive in into member wimble. And, you know, it's just very interesting protocol where like, you know, offered a lot of a, you know, in a ways it's very similar to like the Bitcoin protocol.

Like use a lot of the same topography and a lot of like the same intellectual basis, but you know brings a lot of these really cool features and you know, it has this really cool backstory to it which you know will cover throughout the course of this episode. But you know before we get start but you know, For we jump into that Michael and Daniel. Thank you guys for both for being on. And, you know, Michael, maybe you can introduce yourself how

you got started into the space. Like, you know, before even getting into grin and member lhendable and then, Daniel, maybe you could do the same. Yeah, sure. Okay. Well, thanks for having us. What? Just starts on. My name is Michael corner and I go by the name. Do you boom? In green circles, that would be my handle and I've been working on grinning for. I'd say, we're coming up on nearly two years, maybe a little less than two years at first, just as a part-time developer

contributor. But from about say, February of last year, I've been working on Grand full-time using donations Get into Grand by the community. So previous two grand. I was I mean I have about 20 years worth of kind of overall software development experience, ranging from Financial two games, to kind of do educational software. So so I think kind of a good broad background there immediately previous two to working on grin.

I was doing kind of a lot of low-level cryptographic work on in The Smart Card industry, which has a bit of crossover with with cryptocurrency industry when it comes to Hardware wallets. And what have you? So yeah. So that's basically my background and why I'm here today? Cool. And how did you get you know, get started with Bitcoin is like green sort of like the first Block Chain project you've worked on. So it's the first one I've worked on properly.

I mean I've been following Bitcoin and derivatives for quite some time, but it was only kind of recently as I got kind of more of a got better at applied photography through previous jobs and then the more kind of cryptocurrencies tended to appeal to me because I realize it kind of pushes all my buttons when it comes to interest and too technical in arrest rather. I see. Very cool and Daniel. Yeah, what about you? How did you get involved? Sure.

Thank you for having us. I work as a product manager for a gaming company. Been there for the past 12 years lately. I've been doing a new product development and I heard about grin the first time I think year ago and started reading up on it, starting to get kind of watch the space a little bit, read the get it chats and so on, and then becoming Good morning involved. Mainly on kind of the project management side and the governance side and I've been following the Box in space for a

long time. This is my first project IE heard about Bitcoin in 2011 dismissed it and then bought bought a Bitcoin in 2013 and then kind of been monitoring the space but being quite comfortable watching from the sidelines until I stumbled upon grid and its structure the way. Way the ethos of the project was and you know, the approach taken in developing it made it really attractive and made it really

easy to participate. So I just kind of got sucked in well that's interesting and so most of the great developers is actually Anonymous, right. But you guys here on this show using your clear names. You also go to conferences with your clear names. What, what made you decide to go public with your identities? I probably wouldn't say mostro Anonymous. Now, I think there's only two pretty who were chosen to remain completely Anonymous and that

signal assist the founder. Which I'm sure, we'll talk about it more later and then we have another developer Antioch parole, which in Harry Potter. Laura's is brother who also chooses to remain anonymous, but the rest of us are fairly fairly out in the open. I mean, for my own perspective, probably just didn't know any better when I first got involved with the project so that's why I'm out in the open, but also because I'm taking funding from various sources.

I Well, it's a bit. It's better to be out there. So people know who they're dealing with and, you know, I can be have their own podcasts and promote written without having to worry about that or not, that invisibility cloak.

Yeah, it's similar for my side. I mean, I know I was aware, they were Anonymous developers on the project, but the I just kind of did like a Trade-off in the sense that, you know, in order to be really Anonymous, you have to put in a lot of effort to do that and I just didn't really see that, you know, either you do it, you know the full way or you don't do it at all, there's no point in it because if somebody needs to want to, it's

motivated enough to find your identity, they will and and I just didn't really seem. I see a need for it. I think a lot of the reason why we might feel comfortable being out in with clear names is also because the founder of nostris is anonymous, it Been a bit different if it wasn't for that. So you mean like over time some of the core developers are who maybe were Anonymous earlier after slowly started like revealing their identities over time?

No, I mean, what I mean is, I mean, there's only two who are actually actively trying to hide their identities. The rest are just using nicknames online, but that doesn't mean that they're actually trying to be perfectly hiding in their identities. You see what I mean? Oh, interesting. Okay, everyone except for the few who are Anonymous. We know, personally and we met a

few times now. It's actually quite hard to keep yourself in animus and do it. Well, it's quite a Time sink as well and you have to be really kind of dedicated to it to do it to be able to know you know know exactly what you doing online and be able to cover all your tracks. And all cases is challenging. So it's quite a lot of effort.

It's interesting that that says something different, to the public perception that that did a lot of the developers are actually not a but that's probably just because, you know, the the found it himself or herself is autonomous so yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, cool.

So you know, that's maybe that's jump into a little bit of this founding story then and so you know, I think there's II, you know, I remember I was teaching a class on bitcoin back in like twenty fifteen or Thing, and I think that's around the time, you know, we went to school or teaching this class, we heard about this like, oh, there's this new proposal that's been our around. That was just like, posted on.

Like, you know, I first saw it on our / Bitcoin, but, you know, can you tell us a little bit about this story of how this white paper got? Put into the world and who put it there? Sure, I think he's from his I'm here. So I'll do that. So basically there was this IRC thread our secret for Bitcoin developers. It was it was it called Bitcoin wizard, right? Pick an anonymous person. Basically came in there and dropped the paper.

That outlined the kind of the sketched out, the kind of the basic concept of member Wendel, which was then picked up by Andrew pole, straw, and I think, Brian Bishop Bishop as well. And they kind of had some interactions there and and we post that and repulsed for formalized, some of the concepts in there into a paper and took it from there, right?

Because it from what I remember like, you know, the original document wasn't even like it was like literally just a text a DOT txt file that was just dropped in there and it had like it's look, they're just like, you know, if some quick thoughts on like what this guy was thinking and like some ideas and also, you know, for the listeners, one of the, you know, one of the cute little story things there is. It was signed the the anonymous person, they signed them

themselves. Using the name, Tom Elvis, J disorder, which is like, you know, the French name of Voldemort like in the English versions, it's Tom marvolo Riddle, so it's the French Alias. So yeah. Do you guys have any like, you know, guesses as to who it may have been like, you know, I've heard like, you know, clearly in the text file. A lot of these ideas were heavily derived from like, Greg Maxwell's previous works like coin, join and confidential

transaction. So I've you know I've heard Greg, I've heard it posited that you know it may have just been Greg himself or you guys have any like theories on who this was, or is it not even like of interest to you and you actually don't even care to find out. I don't, I don't personally have any theories on it. It would be interesting as what as you just said there. I think that's kind of key. There were a lot of the member Wendel favorite builds.

A lot of builds upon a lot of ideas that were already there. I kind of developed by established photographers the actual kind of portion of it than that makes up member. Wimble is just kind of a small Insight / addition to what was already presented before. So whoever was didn't necessarily have to be a great cryptographer.

It was Made a great flash of insight wherever it came from but no to me and I mean, I don't think we're ever going to find out who it is and even if the even if whoever it is makes himself known no one's probably, no one will believe them at this point. So I think we just have to leave it as a mythical creation story that this point right there was like no cryptographic signature or anything all over the file. So there's not even any way to know.

Like, no one could even prove it at this point. Anyways, just a text 12 and so what was Andrew poster has contribution here so you know I remember so this file was as positive and then like you know what was the original kind of response to this is where the people like immediately.

Realize that oh, there's like something big here or was it more of like people like okay another proposal and your poster was like did it take time for him to realize that oh there's actually something like you know much more insightful in this

document here. It took I mean, I wasn't around in the early days but from what I can see and Andrew pollster had to look over it and just to make sure that it was sound, I think there was a mistake or two in there that he eventually corrected and I mean he was interested or not from that to write further white paper on how an entire member wimble, blockchain would work and I mean he published a further kind of a proper white paper based on that, which is a little bit

outdated at this point. But and then he had Mother kind of a distance to it of that, you may have seen some presentations. It has about about how to do some additions to its grip the script because there's no scripts and number wimble. There's a lot of a lot of things that you can do in Bitcoin or it's obvious how to do in Bitcoin by scripting that you can't necessarily do as obviously in November but you can still do it.

So a lot of kind of additions to the protocol like that some of them theoretical some of them real fixes to what was there and I think that was it. I mean, after the publication of those papers, I mean he hangs around if we need to get ahold of them to ask many questions I've used there, but he hasn't been to two active. Now, over a table at the past year, either busy or working on other things at this point.

So, yeah, That's interesting. So in a way it's it's unusual for someone to actually pick up a proposal by someone else completely and so deeply immersed yourself and it that you actually find mistakes and can add to it substantially and make it into a fully-fledged proposal. What would you say helped for this to happen? I mean, do you think this is just a lucky break for member wimble? Are there tons of those proposals out there that just someone needs to pick up and

make into something great? And I thought it did. Andrew. Look at this and saw the gem in the dirt. And you know, you know, how do you think about this? If you drop a new proposal for something, or a new idea on in a place, like Bitcoin Wizards, it will generally get looked at fairly quickly by by some serious serious people in the industry. So, I do genuinely think that this, it's not just a matter of getting luckier, you know, being filtered somehow.

It was genuinely a very, very, you know, transformative Insight on what was already there. So, yeah, like I said, the obstacle team, we've seen plenty of papers go. There's actually another A paper put down by someone, claiming to be the same Voldemort in this in a similar style that was dropped. Maybe about six months ago and that was looked at in completely trashed by the community as well. Notice, that makes absolutely no sense that this and more to the point.

This is probably not the same the same Voldemort or if it was. He got lucky that one time so so yeah I don't think there's an element to that. Like I think there's a genuine if you have a good idea and you presented in the crypto space it will get considered generally. Yeah I think he was The the original text file was far from perfect, as you said it, had some errors in it as well, but it was actually presented.

Very succinctly and very approachable way, which also helps, of course, because it makes it easy for anybody who is reviewing its to understand, whether there's some merits to these arguments or not, because it was building on already established Concepts that were already popular in the space. That also, made it much easier. So how did how did it they continue on from there? So how fast that this proposal That Was Then transformed by Andrew post. Ra how fast did it pick up steam?

How fast the developers actually come on board. Well, the first are many Andrew wrote the paper. I'm not, I think it was kind of not quite forgotten about. But, you know, put aside for a couple of months, it was only when, when now ignore someone by the name of ignored, just a girl, who was the founder of the project appeared again on the same channel. I think it was around December of 2016, roughly think. I think even October, I think, if I remember cuentas presentation, so it was quite

fast. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And then he said I've had this was I've actually started a an open source version of this and uploaded the code and invited everyone to take a look. And I think it was it's clear kind of from the early conversations that there was a it was almost obviously apparent that this diagnosis peverell person knew what he was doing. And you know had put up a was starting a really serious effort to put together a memo window blockchain then.

I think I think also there was yeah a few months later towards December the middle window. Full mailing list was established which probably also helps a lot in kind of taking the project forward. It was a lot of discussion going on with a lot of noteworthy and kind of well-known people in the field contributing. It's also kind of helped raise the awareness of the project itself. This episode of epicenter is brought to you by Microsoft and

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Maybe now, we can kind of start talking a little bit about. Like, so we keep saying this like nimble, wimble, blockchain and this move of protocol, but like, you know what, even is this member limbo protocol? And so, you know, maybe we can start off with, like, let's assume our listeners are, you know, relatively very familiar with the Bitcoin protocol. How would you explain memo wimble to them and kind of explain what's going on here? Right.

Okay, well, I think it's rather than just kind of jumping it into the mechanics of it. We should. We should say what, what, the goals of it are, and that would be together by to provide what I call very good, privacy intrinsic to the blockchain. So, now on some other other coins that may have been made, have been originally derived from Bitcoin, the Privacy would kind of be bolted on in certain

ways. Like so your other cars, like my narrow would kind of put You different ways but the core of the chain itself would kind of be the classic Bitcoin chain. As in The Ledger transactions, going back forever with the middle window protocol, you have the Privacy built right into the core level. So if I put, if I perform a transaction, what ends up on the chain is basically, it looks like random data. And this, the way this is done also allows some other interesting properties to come

out of there. Such as Positive effect on the transaction size or on the chain size, it ends up. You end up getting a much the same privacy as other coins with the much greatly reduced storage space requirements, as well as some other kind of nifty features that are on to it. All of its kind of add together to enhance privacy without kind of the load that you may get some other chains so that's kind of fundamentally, what member Wendel itself is about.

So you see as the primary benefit being the Privacy step side of things? Yes, absolutely, I know men, its built-in, it's at the protocol level. It's not optional interest because I remember when I like first heard about member Wendel, I always actually usually are when I heard about it in the context of, you know, scalability and like, you know, increasing the sink times of

like, of the chain. But then I feel like I only started actually hearing about the Privacy benefits, like, you know, later on. So it's interesting that like, you know, I guess I just I obviously, I haven't been asked. Over there. So I guess I kind of heard of I didn't really hear what the Privacy side of thing until much later on. It's definitely like it's a privacy point. It's a confidentiality pointed out that would pretty much be the from our perspective at

least the number one. The number one reason for being the scalability stuff is certainly nice to have and it's something that that we're improving on as time goes on. You know, Finding ways to make it even more scalable, how do we reduce the size of UT? Exocet, Etc, probably talk about some more. Technical details later on. Yeah, and maybe it's good to kind of point out that.

Yeah, there's the member window protocol, which we talked about which was kind of dropped on the IRC Channel and everything. And then you have Grim, which is an implementation of the member when the protocol, but it's so much more than that as well. Of course, it's not only the protocol itself, but a bunch of other things and different approaches and philosophies that add to that, actually, and they kind of a key key. Things that can really stand out in terms of implementation,

implementation wise. For from, from when I think, is that is tries to be very privacy-preserving to the greatest extent possible. I tries to be scalable and and it tries to be minimal in the approach that it takes and its design as a, as a blockchain. In general, to be very kind of lat lightweight, and that kind of contributes also to the Privacy aspects because you don't want to put a lot of information. Formation on the chain and so on. You want to do as little as

possible, basically. And that that adds to it has like some nice properties to it. There's no, there's no addresses on the train, for example. And so on which it contributes to it being lightweight, but it also helps in the Privacy aspects of it. So I see the Privacy aspect is the main feature of in Belleville, but the scalability is also one feather add-on that you want by the add-on benefit that you get. Could you briefly explain how it

works on a technical level. Yeah, that's remaining. This is kind of it is a bit difficult to do without without whiteboards and a bit of time and then dealing with confused stairs but basically instead of how Bitcoin Because you have a ledger of transactions, going back to the beginning of to the Genesis block basically and you need to verify each and every transaction in order to start a new note Nimble window works at

a bit more mathematically. So, so rather than The Ledger itself or having to validate the measure itself, you just need to validate the some of what's happened before. So when I put maybe I can try and walk through bit of transaction example, if I perform a transaction, right? Right? I have inputs and outputs and transactions are basically a load of inputs. Plus your book, plus a bunch of outputs, and it doesn't matter

how many there are. It doesn't matter how many participants there are just a number of in the amount of the inputs that have gone in have to equal the amount of the airports that have come out. Okay, so long as that's true then the transaction is valid. Now on top of that we have something called an excess value which is used to prove Which is used to to enhance privacy, as well as prove ownership or

something. So, say, I have a load of trans a load of inputs and it adds up to a certain number will then choose a private key that represents another addition to that number. And only, I know that number so, and that's my private key. So, in order to validate, that inputs outputs, plus my private key that I've chosen, which is in excess, Everything equals 0, I can do that without actually having to store the values of the amounts in there, right?

So validators can just add this all together. Check it out and check everything, equal 0 and move on. So that's fundamentally. What happens on a simple window blockchain. Does that make any sense? It does. So I think it's actually really difficult to explain with without white wood as you said. But party, what do you say? It's fair to describe. Hi bit as being cryptography. That is well known and is also used for Bitcoin with additional elements for our first occasion.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean that we basically use the same Library that's used in Bitcoin. We use the same the same curve. It's all based on the same fundamental mathematics. It's just the way we're kind of putting it together is slightly unique, remember wimble? Okay? And so this results in a blockchain, we're not only the transaction amounts of skated, it's it's also offer skated where they're coming from and where they're going and that's what do you what do you say

that's factually? Correct. Yeah, it is truck. I mean I wouldn't even say they're all disconnected, they're just not there. Yeah, there's not enough so I should say, you know, that this is no there, no addresses on the chainsaw. Of course, you're not going to see from where it's going, but there is a chain of of outputs of utx cells essentially unchanged, but it, but it's very hard to derive.

Making any sense of that. That's basically the only information that is only served if there's no address is right? So, you know, how do signatures work in this system, right? Well, let's take that a signature. It's a signature basically proves that I had that that excess value. Could I was talking before because I've that's that's what I use to sign. The outputs that I put into a transaction right on in the blockchain itself. It's kind of its outputs all the

way down. There's no transactions on there and in order to spend an output I need to ensure that I have this excess value for each and every output that I put on there and then all of these added together become I have to prove Of, I knew the sum of all of these and then validate that I can sign with that, and validators will be able to use that to, to prove, you know, to witness the thing. And to prove that I have the right to spend it.

I see. So essentially what's going to happen here is like you know there's some excess value in this last transaction that was sent to me and I am the only one who has knowledge of it and I'm able and by revealing that proving that knowledge of that, I'm the only one able to spend this but Did this excess value get into the previous transaction. So, you know, how did yeah, why is it in the output from the previous transaction?

If I did like, didn't that mean that whoever sent me the coins had to have known that excess value right now, they knew their excess value but when, when a transaction happens I create a new one which represents my things.

So what happens is someone sends me a bunch of inputs for a certain amount and then I will create and as well as The signature will contain their excess value and that gets sent to me. And what I do is I create my own excess so I can create an output for that amount, right? And then I have one output that I know the excess value for and then I can validate all the inputs that came into the transaction from the other person, equal that amount.

So the sum is there and that's how that's how that's validated. Right. So one of the key features are differences here with the member wimble system is that in order to receive money. I have to actually like you know, be part of the transaction making process right up right on any cryptographic strength and say that's an interactive transaction. And that's the thing, too. It doesn't mean you need to be online. It doesn't mean it doesn't any of those connotations.

It just means two parties, need to interact to, they need to exchange information somehow, and that can be On the Internet by steep here can be via sending files to each other. It can be via 10 count on a string, it just has to happen somehow. That's not have any implications for the user experience as opposed to, you know, when you compare it to sending say Bitcoins. Oh yeah, tons of it. It's, you know, it's a very, very different experience and so it for good and bad as well.

Write it so so it's just different, I would say. So, as Michael said, there's a full round trip, is required to complete the transaction which means that I as a sender, need to send you some information, you take that information, you process that Get back to me then I can finalize it and put it on the check. Right?

But that also means that in order for unlike, for example, Bitcoin, where you can just kind of in the blind, shoot transactions, to addresses here, actually, both parties need to participate in order to receive which in some cases can sound like it's a lot of hassle or work but in other cases it's actually really good because then you can actually, if you want to make sure you have to keep like an audit Trail or like kind of keep your finances in order you can.

Or that you have full control of the funds that you receive because you're actually actively participating in receiving them. If you see what I mean, nobody can kind of spam you with with, with a bunch of transactions. Right.

Some people actually may actually see this as a pro because I remember about a couple weeks ago, this is like YouTuber who I like to follow his name is Tom Scott and he kind of got into an argument with Brendan eich who is working on as you know Brave or basic attention token and he was kind of getting upset that in Brave in basic attention, token.

And so and really any most cryptocurrencies day, Bitcoin theorem that people have the ability to send you money without Out. You're like, you know, consent essentially and this could have like weird sort of legal or regulatory consequences. And so, you know, to some people they might actually see this as a pro and like, help the like adoption from like a legal perspective, as well. Absolutely. And also from like, you know, from from the from the, from the point of like being a merchant,

right? Then you said, you know, instructions to your customer, how to pay you. It prevents a lot of user error as well, because if you use it does The wrong you'll hopefully, you'll detect that is part of building that transaction. And you can reject those transactions rather than the user setting it to the wrong address. Getting that processed and then saying, Hey, where's my, Where's My Money?

Where's my, where's my stuff? And the you have this kind of Disconnect where you try to figure out what actually happened here. It's much easier to do that in an interactive protocol. Whether Merchants can kind of sense, check whether it's the correct behavior. In this, expected behavior from the customer. But it is it is also like I should say it's a different Paradigm than like what's usually being done today in

blockchains. So there is like a lot of kind of extra effort or thinking that that goes into it from like Merchants perspective and also from users perspective. So so it is, it is a kind of a different approach that that we're taking Okay, so in member Wendel, while it's interact to create privacy preserving, interactions, how does this help with scalability? Right. There's a few things, I think most simply in order to think of if I'm a new node on the network.

In order to sync up, I don't need to have the whole history of the chain behind me. I need I simply need to have the headers and I seem to Simply need to have enough of

something. What we call the transaction kernel, which contains all of the all of the signatures today to make sure that they add up to zero and I need to make sure that those all that up. So instead of you know, if you if you think a new Bitcoins I know for instance, you're downloading the whole history in this case, no, you just need to download the headers and then enough information to make sure that your thumb with the some of the entire chain equals zero.

And then you should be good to go. I mean, it's only early days for the green chain at the moment, but you can already see like this. Distinct process is a few minutes and that should provided, the header think time. Kind of is fast enough that the same time should remain fairly constant for a new node coming on, no matter how big the chain is. So that's certainly one advantage. There. And there's other ones which are

probably. They were mentioned in the paper, but they're probably in practice, not quite. As quite as you know, good for quite as Bountiful say, for scalability, one of them is a notion of core through which is if if I send transaction I send the transaction to somebody and they immediately send it to somebody else. I can actually cut out some of the outputs in the middle of that because everything was still light up.

So I'm basically I'm basically taking, you know, the same number of both sides of an equation and yeah Daniel may have stopped give anything to add as well. Yeah. I think you covered it but I wanted to point out that it was part of that thinking process. This is not like a light clients think or anything like that this or as PV approach, it's actually like a full node sink and and it gives you like proper security guarantees. And it's much faster than, you know, And she'll approaches.

Right. Yeah, I mean so I've actually been you know gambling around with like the grin nodes and like I've been trying to run a grin minor over the past week or so and so when I actually started I opened up my grid node and it's like sink in a matter of like 30 seconds or so. And not that like the green box chains only been around for a month anyway, so it's like it wouldn't have been that long anyways, but it kind of blew me away that like, I'm like, woah.

Did it actually just sink? Like, I probably messed something up. I need to try this again. Like like it kind of blew my mind. Yeah, we got it's early days for the blockchain but it's even after a month like it should take longer. If it were traditional blockchain it would be taking longer already. So right. Exactly. And so that really amazed me there so with this cut through thing.

So you know you're so you're saying we can, you know, kind of like to give some intuition for the listeners. Essentially, what we can do here is once transactions have been spent, we can kind of like Delete them from the train. Essentially we're aggregating, everything that's already spend. And so all we have is the current UT exocet and nothing of the history, right? Is there. And so does that mean it's constant? Is there any like piece of data that has to stick around from

the history? Or is it, does it all completely like 100% disappear? No, no. The transaction kernels need to stay around and that's probably the biggest potent. The biggest Point against scalability or something very much like You see, there's no way to currently compress the kernels into, you know, into some them off. Basically let you can most other parts of the system. If you do figure that out one day, then we're going to have a very very compact blockchain.

I'm not even sure you can call it a chain and at that point could you explain slightly what this Colonel is like, right? So the signature I was talking about earlier. There's a few, there's a few things that most importantly, is that signature, that proves the value and that's, and that becomes part of a sum. So if I need to sum up all of the kernels, It's in the blockchain.

I'm basically done basically summing up everything that's ever happened and so long as it equals 0, it doesn't matter how many there were, where they came from. Then I know the change is valid at that point and that all has to be contained within the kernel. Which unfortunately haven't found a way to to get rid of at

this point or some I see. And so that one question, another question here is, I'm sure you guys may have heard of a project called Coda which is like they use sort of what they call a recursive snarks to achieve actually somewhat very similar properties to what you're achieving here and so but you know the benefit here is with snarks. You kind of you know you can do more than just these like basic

transactions. You can kind of essentially in theory you You know, you can essentially put any sort of computation into here including like very complex, smart contracts and whatnot. But you know it seems the con here is you know obviously they're depending on somewhat more complex topography. And so what how do you, how do you see the comparison between this member Wendel protocol and these code of recursive snarks? Yeah, member Wendel itself.

It's being considered as a positive or negative but because it is so succinct the cryptography that use, it's basically algebra top of Photography that there and because it's so statista Saint and so kind of compact and kind of self-contained, it's difficult to kind of put any other stuff around it necessarily. So like there are no scripts in there but I mean we were talking earlier about this notion of script the script.

So there are there are ways kind Their mathematical trick tricks, a lot of them still still theoretical but could be employed on top of this. So that's that's kind of the main difference. I think that it's so succinct and so compact that it's difficult to sometimes add more functionality to it or to think of how you're going to add functionality to it and those who it's as you pointed out it relies on minimal security assumption but the discrete logarithm problem is hard and that's it.

You know, that's that that's very, very important and makes it a big difference. Yeah absolutely. I mean member Wendel, it's zero knowledge. All the way through zero knowledge proof. They all the way through We didn't episode on Kota a couple of months ago. So if you're interested listener, go check that out. So how would you say does member when Bo compared to Z cash on one Arrow or other privacy? First chains, I'm from what perspective? From a technology technology perspective.

Orgasm from a functionality, the functionality and Technology perspective. I mean, they're both of them kind of touch upon things. We've talked about, like, I and again, I don't want to be disparaging to any of these projects are just purely a point of comparison and we have a lot of respect for the present cash and mineiro in particular, it's so that cash rent, we're talking about it. It's based on the historic Seaver talked about earlier, to

completely trusted setup. Nimble wimble itself and any member Wendel coin is going to be completely zero knowledge. So although there's no not like a key ceremony or anything to start it up, it's all completely trustless. And the case of Manero, I mean they have a lot probably saved more privacy features than what's in member Wendel at the moment. But a lot of that comes out an expense. So they use Briggs ring

signatures at some point. They use was coming to mind right now, but there's all of the kind of different methods that Have Bobby skating transactions are kind of on top of a Bitcoin like structure. So, and again, remember when Bill itself is just a very compact concise way of doing it. So those would be kind of the main comparison points. I would also describe manero's more kind of mature. It compared to wood grain is but granny simpler.

There's a lot of more privacy features in more narrow but still grinning simpler and achieves kind of a lot with a little space and kind of approach minimal approach with Z cash, you have, which fully shielded transactions, better privacy properties. But as Mike was saying, requires a trusted set. And also has this problem of shielded versus unshielded transactions.

So you don't have actually privacy on by default in the protocol itself, which is very different from from from grinning that comes with its own kind of problems. I know that Z cash companies and then the foundation is actively working to improve that and have more, and more transactions going through the shielded ones, which are more computationally expensive than the unshielded ones. But that's a big, big difference.

And then we have governance approaches of these of these two projects we certain sort of generally different as well. So when you think of like, you know, the impact, you know, the effectiveness of a privacy solution, how I usually like to think of it as like, you know, what is the Privacy set the anonymity set here, right? And so when you, when you use manero's ring signatures, you're basically choosing a couple of other transactions to mix in with.

And the end your anonymity set is only the size of a few Actions like no. No, I think the default was about 5 or something. And then the idea is, as you keep making more transactions gets muddled. But in Z cash, the anonymity set is the entire set of all other shielded transactions. Right? So, how would you, what's the? And so clearly the anonymity set of Z cash is much much larger than that of Manero. Where did, how would you describe the anonymity set of member wimble? Right?

All right with bring signatures in particular. I believe those are used mostly to cover up the the transaction graph as in if someone is following, you know is monitoring nodes and is watching transactions, they can kind of start to piece together information about what's happening there and then, that's something that that's an ongoing challenge that we always have discussions about that right

now. We have a protocol in place called called dandelion which is an a you know, an attempt to To hide not completely concealed. With certainly make it more difficult for someone to follow a transaction graph. And that works by instead of just one or no get to transaction, it doesn't just burst it to, to every note, it knows about it actually follows during what we call a stem phase, send it to one node, sends to another node to another

node. And eventually you know, Brandon Lee one of them will then do the fluff phase which is broadcast to all of the piers at nose. In terms of the Ottoman and annuities that in theory, it, you know, because you're doing with member. When will you support non-interactive coin joints? If assuming that the, you know, you can aggregate all the transactions, but basically in a block or, you know, send out an aggregated transaction broadcast

out to the chain as well. So you have a lot of kind of, there's a lot of opportunities to improve that anonymity set as it goes out. Galaxy. I mean my if you're looking if you look at the blockchain, they have nothing else to go on. You just looking at the contents of the chain of the Ute, exocet there isn't, you can get absolutely nothing for out. There is no way to get anything from it and the points of the system and the anonymity set is

very much based around. How easy is it for someone to construct the transaction graph and reconstruct, what happened? And it's something that we're continually working on through through various, you know, Research into various Technologies and additions to what We're doing if like you know once transactions have made it onto the chain.

It's essentially a coin, join amongst all transactions that have happened and so it does kind of give you a, you know, a very, very large anonymity set but it doesn't solve the problem of, you know, the what of observing the peer-to-peer Network and you know, anyone who's trying to break privacy, will definitely be doing that. And you know I know companies have done this in the past. I've seen Alice's and And so, that's where this like dandelion comes in.

And dandelion is sort of this like privacy feature in grin that is actually no, completely independent of member Wendel. It's like a separate privacy feature. And so, you know, you described it a little bit about this, like, fluff thing. But, can you look describe it a little bit further from my understanding? You can kind of think of it as this like tour Mix net kind of thing for transactions is that like a my having the right mental model here? Here or I mean dandy-lion

itself. That there's a few things happening dandelion and member Wendel itself are very complementary Technologies, okay? Because in order to perform this this coin type aggregation that we've been talking about it needs to be done in one way. And one way only before his the chain because you could have problems. If all, if all nodes everywhere or putting together transactions and lumping them together in different ways. And then you can end up with with issues when they try to get to be.

We got apply to the chain now with dandelion because dandelion, there's a distinct phase where the transaction is being sent from one note to the next note to another node one at a time, along the stem, as I was calling it that gives us an opportunity to apply this this coin to transaction as we go along. So as a trans actor, as a transaction goes through the stem phase, it gets aggregated with with other transactions as it goes along until finally.

Since until finally, it gets to, you know, at some random point one no we're gonna sit, right? No more aggregation. And then explode and then all of the nodes are all of its peers know about it and it gets propagated that way to in building. When you do you do the boss like you basically Evernote kind of just immediately when they have something to broadcast the broadcast it out to everybody, they're connected to the network, right?

And here the purpose of dandelion is basically to do that but it's just not you who Does that kind of explosion? The gossip protocol used said pass the transaction that you have through one of two directions and then there's basically a coin flip between for every node whether they're gonna spread it out or just pass it along to a single node, that makes it much harder for somebody who's monitoring the entire network, to figure out where that transaction

originated from the network. Because just because it gets broadcasted out from a note, doesn't mean that that note that the action belongs to that note, if it's, if you see lemon, okay, so, you know, maybe we can like kind of walk through how this

dandelion process works. So essentially happen, here is, let's say, you know, we have this large Network and I'm the one who's creating this transaction, I'll go ahead and send it, you know, maybe to Michael Michael, you'll send it to Daniel. And then Daniel has this, like seed thing that like, it tells them when it's time to propagate it. Right? And so, he'll be the one to like, push it to the rest of the network. But where's this aggregation

happening? Is it that like, let's Say if it just so happens that the two stems of a dandelion intersect, then that person whoever had that intersection of two of the stems that Veil like be the one who's locally aggregating it. Yeah. So so there will be, you know, at every Epoch there will be a couple of notes that will be fluffing notes and a lot of transactional going to end up at those fluffy nodes and at that point they get aggregated and before they get flushed up, okay?

So there is some mechanism of like so the the path of the stem isn't just completely random to the peer-to-peer Network. They are kind of moving towards some aggregator notes who will do the aggregation. In there, but it changes after every Epoch, it kind of resets and everybody cannot do. I new connections and so, how does the Louvre?

At least that's how it's done in dandelion plus plus, which is I think what we're actually, I think we have a simpler version implemented in in England, today, it's like the original dandelion paper and I think this version 1.1, I think it's going to come out in that approach. How are these nodes chosen. Exactly. Their chosen at random amongst themselves. Like there's a coin flip on each side. Am I going to fluff it? Or I'm going to pass it along this time and that's just in the

in the current simpler version. But I think they're the reason that there's a 1.1 of this coming out is because it kind of reduces the, the chances are the occurrence, the chances for, for any aggregation to happen. So for aggregation to happen, are you need a transaction to come into OneNote? And then two and then to be stem through another node that has some other transactions in it, right?

So what channel just described for done deal and plus plus is a way of ensuring that more aggregation happens in the dandelion Network. So what happens if there's not a lot of usage on the network and they're not enough transactions to actually compound Yeah, if they're not a lot of you should then been transactions, don't get, don't get aggregated. I mean, you'll see, I mean it's early days for the chain so I mean, you'll see a lot of blocks there.

It's you know, one transaction in there are two transaction in the more one plus the coinbase. So yeah, I mean, the more users are on the network. The more transactions are going around the greater the chances of there being aggregation, so it is, it is definitely related to the the amount of usage on the network. Let me that's also why we're building it. I mean, we're not building it for kind of like low usage and see what we go. We don't really have any interest in doing that.

There's nobody kind of like it's better off for doing that. Instead you know, everybody's kind of working towards this idea that this is going to be a, you know, a big well Use protocol that's the Assumption. So. So as you just briefly mention it, the mention Grand, actually launched January, that was last month. So green is actually the implementation of remember when both are both of you are working on and we kind of skipped over about this. We skipped over this like a

little bit. There's also another implementation name beam. Would you, can you tell us how bement grin actually differ from each other? The green was launched in October 2016. I think and the beam is a second member, Wendel implementation.

That was announced I think in May or June something 20 2018 and they do is they take a different approach governance structure organizational, they are there's a development company building that visiting different language has some adopted some of the approaches that we do in Grid. But they are on their own cannot separate. Path is not like a fork or anything.

It's their own separate project and you know we in general of course, is going to be many different women with limitations if anybody who wants to can put one together. So so I think that's that's it. But it's very kind of it's a very different structure in terms of how they are organized and what their approach is to some of the things So is there like you know, what is the extent of the relationship between the teams is there like a lot of information sharing?

Because I know for example, you know, the green team is that one who kind of came up with this idea of dandelion and so then being kind of adopted it. But I know there's also something interesting Innovation happening from the beam side where, you know, I was reading some of their documentation and they have like a mechanism of sort of these kernels. We were talking about that are being left in the chain.

They have a method of like, kind of pruning those out and incentivizing the pruning of the Those. They also have this a bulletin board thing that they were talking about, we're like it helps with this interactivity needed. So is there any like what is the kind of the communication between these teams and like, you know, any plans? So kind of like Port over some of their features back into grin. Right. So just to point out that you know, dandelion is not our invention.

It's Julia fonte. And some other researchers that have a particular protocol and yeah, there are different. You know, in general the Grim project interacts with any team or any kind of any individual researchers that want to interact and want to share knowledge in like an Earnest way. We do have some kind of communication with the beam team as well, they donated to our to

our fun. And we don't have like a like a good relationship with them generally though, what kind of I think green is focused on is to do this very kind of minimal implementation that doesn't have a lot of overhead and doesn't have a lot of keeping things simple and and we're definitely open for influences a new ideas when it came out. And when they do, we evaluate them, we met them and then you know, if they're good we adopt them.

Any thoughts on the current? Like some of the ones that they've already started on, like this bulletin board, or the kernel fusion and stuff. Maybe the kind of the fundamental difference here. I think is that the grain is as adopted a community approach to a lot of things. So for instance, like the bulletin board that you just talked about is basically it's a way of dealing with the the interaction problem that we were talking about earlier. How do you, how do people interact?

How does it work? If someone's not Well, how do you send funds to somebody without without them being around or online to perform the transaction? And and I mean Grim have a being at brother has a what a piece a prescriptive approach to this right? You built a bulletin board and you do your chores actually here in this is a solution grins approach is to leave that up to

the community and other authors. So for instance, for the that particular problem, our approach is to provide a very decent set of wallet tools to do the fundamentals of building transactions and politics. And then let the community come up with different ways of handling solutions to these problems, according to different needs, you know, some people might might only want to meet in dark alleys with Bits of Paper and that's how they want to do their transactions and that's

fine. We can support that other people might want to come along and build some Solutions on top of that. Like there's a there's a there's an open source project called wallet, 713 that has another solution built on, top of that. Each time you arrive at a solution like this on top. Top of member Wendel. You're also adding, you know, you're actually lessening the security and confidentiality a bit as well. So that has to be taken into consideration.

So, I think like a fundamental approaches Community, we're trusting the community to take written as the core layer, and then build build custom Solutions, or whatever suits various groups on top of that. Yeah. And I mean it's exactly as Michael says, and I mean, that's the beauty of it because it's not prescriptive and, and it lets, you know, basically the community figure it out and try different approaches and see what is the one that's going to

get traction and usage. I-i'm for full disclosure, I'm involved in bullets of 13 and the green box, transaction protocol that we're doing. And the reason why we did it was because we saw a need for it, an opportunity to do it, that would make sense to add some value. So, we do that. And as a result, there's now, you know many, you know, there's another team now doing building on top of gray, right?

And I think, if you look at it, you know, if you take a, like, a macro view on it, it has to be many different development teams. Trying to solve specific problems that they have, you know, make things better in the usage of a chain rather than like this Reliance on like a single entry point. And I think it's a single Central kind of company or whatever organization would be. I don't. Think that's a scalable approach because, you know, it becomes. Yeah.

Yeah. You need to let like many attempts kind of to solve the same problem and see which one works basically. It's like the bizarre versus Cathedral discussion. Writing software development.

So you know, we talked a lot about nimbala humble and just dandelion stuff but you know and I know another area that you know, the green team has been kind of like developing heavily is you know kind of innovating on this like you know proof-of-work algorithm as well as like you know experimenting with like new issuance models and inflation models. And so you know I know you guys are using this proof-of-work algorithm called cuckoo cycle and like you know it kind of

started with this. Desire to try to create like an Asic, resistance hashing algorithm, but then over time, it seems that like the goals of this hash proof-of-work algorithm design have changed heavily and now there's this like, you know, complex are to system version and it can you kind of explain to me what's going on here?

Sure. So this is like a high level kind of summary of this like a family of proof-of-work algorithms created by John Trump called, you know, the cuckoo cycle family which basically the algorithm then the whole objective is you have like this bunch of nodes connections between different units in a hash table. The cuckoo has table and the objective is basically to find like a 42. 42 loop loop that connects 42 notes, and that's a

solution for your proof of work. And as a description of what we do today, we have basically two proof of works. One is the Asic resistant algorithm, which is kind of optimized towards gpus. And the other one is an Asic targeted algorithm, which is optimized towards a six development. All right. And When we launched the balance between these two proof of work was that 90% of mining rewards was going to the GPU and 10% of mining rewards are going to the Asic tuned algorithm over time

in the course of two years. This is all this balance is going to shift completely. So that 100% of mining rewards are going to Asic tuned. So, in two years time, the idea is that everybody is going to be mining on the Asic to And algorithm. Originally as you pointed out there was one proof-of-work could recycle and when John first initially review of the workout Ryan who was believed that it could run, you know that you could mine efficiently or competitively using a mobile phone.

It's a but overtime. Optimizations were discovered that basically meant that CPU mining was ruled out as efficient and it was like a big advantage Just for basic minors to, you know, there was a lot of opportunities to build efficient basic miners using the cuckoo cycle algorithm. Now, the reason why we moved away from from a single proof of work into to prove it works was that this algorithm was known and it was available widely known before we launch the coin.

And we had received several very credible indications, that a six were being built for this algorithm which would add day one of the launch of the coin. Completely taken over the hash power and kind of centralized entire mining which we didn't really want. We don't even think that was a

good idea. We do however see that because of all these you know time doesn't stand still and what we've learned since you know, John first published at that algorithm and since the beginning of Grimm is that you know Asics are inevitable and there will always be a way to kind of do if optimizations and even if you're not going to optimize on the Asics, you're going to be able to optimize the

guy mining with a GPU at home. It's not going to be as Isn't this as the person who's connected to a dam in China and has 10,000 gpus. So there's going to be a lot of efficiencies and that's inevitable. However, trying to launch a coin in a fair manner, in 2019 puts a

couple of problems to that. So you need to have a way to basically bootstrap the network in a way that gives people some chance to mind fairly to the point where, you know, you over time, you can gradually shift over to To this, Asic friendly algorithm and give a sick manufacturers enough. Leeway in enough time to prepare for that and have multiple a

seat. Manufacturers may be billed at the same time in order to create as competitive of a Marketplace as possible for these police Asics, it was very kind of long answer, but that's kind of my view wanted Michael, you know, if you have anything to add The thing about the Grant in our process, the work is a sex are going to happen anyways and that doesn't matter. You can you can try and avoid it. You can try and design an algorithm that you know, can't be done, it won't happen.

They're going to happen at some point. So, the best thing you can do is try and make it as fair for everybody and try and actually make it your algorithm simple to specify for a six manufacturers to allow more of them to allow Market. I mean a system cells aren't necessarily They're actually, you know, the closer you get to sound. This is something again, we're back to Andrew Colstrip. A tree called the thermodynamic limit. If you had a machine that was

absolutely. The most optimized it could possibly could be her proof-of-work, algorithm, and everyone has one of those machines then every time that's actually the best. The best case for mining there is so by encouraging AC development and hopefully there will be a you know a few options to choose from they'll be readily available. This should actually help secure the network as I was yeah. Lost my point. There is like mining 886 themselves aren't evil.

It's when they're all under the control of a single entity or a single Corporation, then that's a centralization pressure. So by trying to encourage as many to Pez many Hardware developers becomes develop a sex and we're hoping for a more fair market. So, you went with them, the to proof of work system in order to ensure continuous decentralization throughout the life of grain. But there are disadvantages that come with proof of work.

And this is why many people are talking about switching to proof of stake for many different chains. Is this something this, that is in a concern for you as grin developers as well? Are you firmly committed to proof-of-work? Now, we're very firmly committed to proof of work. Moment, nobody has proven that proof of stake. Will secure that will secure network as well as proof of work. Nobody has proven that, you know, it is entirely Fair like

it very much rewards. People who already have a steak and proof of stake and it Sono. The, the green team at the moment is very much proof of work only. Yeah. As someone who's been working on proof of stake for like, you know, two years. Now, I actually completely agree with you.

I don't think there's been any evidence that like proof of stake and properly secure network and especially It seems that like you know grin seems to be one of I've heard the story where it's like you know didn't seem to be like the next best bet at money other than Bitcoin. And like you know if you want to create decentralized money you know you need to have had a similar origin story and Anonymous founder and like and so if you're creating I just don't think proof of stake works

properly as an issuance mechanism for, you know who it's, you know, who knows what will be in 10 years time in general that the team and the community in general, General is open to any new technology as long as it's kind of, makes sense. And that is at this stage proof of stake, doesn't make sense as you correctly pointed out as well, you couldn't, we couldn't have launched with conclusive proof of stake because it creates huge problems of how you

distribute the coins fairly. And at that point, you know, in terms of actually initial distribution of coins, as far as I know, I haven't heard of any better ways to do it fairly this. The proof of work. So speaking of this like initial distribution and issuance so I guess two part question here. One is, you know, this issuance mechanism. You know, you guys have an experiment, like a new monetary policy that I haven't seen it.

I've known the other coin. I've seen this like similar monetary policy and is Dogecoin, but essentially this idea of Unlimited Supply where it's but constant issuance, so it's like, you know, you have this like, it's fun, like little time is money meme going on where it's like 11 grin per Canon or 60 Grand per minute and but until the end of time, so like there's

no fixed cap. Like there is in like Bitcoin, or like coin, or any of these other money currencies that are trying to become base money, for example, and so, kind of what led you down to what what who made that decision of like trying this new policy as to how I think. It's something that the team arrived at actually fairly early on in development. When we're talking about various models and schedules, I've how to do this.

I think most importantly, okay, a few things, I mean, this is a big can of worms and you get all sorts of hate mail for any time you start talking about this. The model that came up originally by Satoshi in Bitcoin. As in there were going to be a fixed number of Bitcoins. It's going to be an entirely deflation area system. That's, that's great to know. There seems to be a wide help. Widely held belief out there that this was handed down to him

on a tablet. From God. At some point in, this is the way it should be for all time. There's a lot of problems with that approach and you've seen that in Bitcoin. Everybody seen this with the hyper deflation that you see in Bitcoin. Now, you know, the paper said, was supposed to be a digital cash and it's turned into a store of value and that's the story now so that approach is quite problematic.

The other thing is nobody yet knows whether a fee Market on its own is going to be enough to secure a network when the fees from Bitcoin become too low. So we, we think that the approach we've taken, which is just a constant block commission, 60 grams per block, once a minute forever and by. And by the way, this This is actually quite conservative as far as putting a currency out there. I mean the inflation rate becomes 0 you know 30 years on and you're barely making an imagined.

If you can only print 60 US dollars a minute like you'd have hyper deflation. You know, this is actually a rather conservative approach and you know it is, it is new and the cryptocurrency world. I don't think it's that radical. I think it's easy to understand. I think it will. It will help secure the network when fees run out, it will help. It will help people to use Grim as as money as opposed to hoarding it because they're afraid is going to be worth far more tomorrow. So yeah.

So that's that's kind of where we're can't speak for the entire team. With that's basically where we stand on it at this point. And ultimately this is very simple, right? It's very, very easy, to explain. Very easy to understand, it's hard to kind of I haven't seen a lot of arguments as you know, Well constructed as to why it is a problem and since then it is you know, very simple structure. We like it. It's elegant, right. Yeah. You know, I think this whole time is money, meme.

I think actually it will work. I think it's easy to explain and, you know, I think there's a lot it'll be very interesting to see how this farestart plays out like, you know. But I don't think we've, I think the last time we saw something similar to a fair star, but clearly not, as fair was like this, he cash start. And even that was you know, they Have their whole like developer fun side of things.

But, you know, and I remember like, what happened when I remember my roommate, my ex-roommate. She like, no, it's really hyped about the grand Mining. And I know like there was like, I don't know.

I've heard a crazy figures about like, VCS, like putting hundreds of millions of dollars or something into, I don't know that much but crazy amounts of money into like, you know, mining Ventures very early on in Grand when it like, started with zero Supply. So It'll be very interesting to see how this new farestart and issuance mechanism works out. So now that we're kind of drawing towards the close of the episode. No.

Just want to talk. Maybe ask a few one or two questions, a little bit about know, a bit about the future of grain and what the future roadmap is and whatnot. And so, one of the questions that, you know, often comes up about grain, is that in order to make this memo wimble, Feature work, we kind of had to remove Bitcoin script Because, you know, you can't it's not part, it doesn't work with aggregation. And so, how will we, what is the plan here for? You know, does this mean that

you know, is it possible to do? Multi cigs on undrained? Will it be possible to do H TLC's Atomic swaps? Is any of this possible on the road map? Absolutely. As a matter of fact, Atomic swaps with both. Are you want and Bitcoin have been done before? Multisig is definitely, it's

possible. We know how to It just, I don't think it's been implemented in the code, but to be certainly have kind of the foundation in there to do that other stuff, you know, smart contracts, we've talked about script descriptive it. Those are essentially ways of kind of enforcing unfortunate, the usual conditions you'd be enforcing in a contract without having to have a contract in particular in place. So, yeah, they're definitely possible. I won't say we have the answers

to all of them at this point. There's certainly a lot of research outstanding and if you kind of look through our site and what we have there, You know there's a there's a list there of technologies that we're looking into and researching how

to do this. And yeah that's basically the future in the future is going to be for us will be, you know, building the tool to support community building on top of grin and on top of member wimble as well as you know, slow and steady research as to you know other Technologies become important in here again like Atomic swaps Spirits some you know lightning like Network on top of that. So yeah that's that's It's kind of very briefly what our future

looks like. And so back to that question about the Fair start and like, you know, so does he cash team with their Fair start? They funded themselves by giving themselves a like a developer cut of all the block Awards, you know, Satoshi funded his Fair start by like, you know, do it like mining like crazy when like Bitcoin first came out and because it just wasn't very popular. But like I said, you know, lots of outside money. I was poured into grin mining from very early on.

And so, what is the funding model here? Now, for the grin developers, how is this going to be sustainable? There's no pre mind nothing like that. So, Grim is 100% Community funded we live by. I mean, Michael is funded through donations. The there is a debt fund and a security audit fund the raise donations for for specific purposes. But Relies 100% on donations from the community and from from Miners and other companies active in the space to contribute.

And and I think, you know, you touched upon a very important thing there that, yeah, you know, hot, what is fair and, and you know what is, what is a fair launched and I think green is, has probably been one of the more first launches that have been around because it's simply because of the fact that, you

know, it had a lot of attention. Lot of eyeballs on it from day one, which a lot of other projects really didn't have including Bitcoin early on and you know, equal opportunity doesn't mean equal outcome and you know, we welcome anybody to come in mind, you know, whether the Reese's or not or whether their users, and whether it, welcome any, any anybody to come and participate in the project, and that's the strength, I think it's the reason why I got involved, you know, a year ago,

because it's very easy. Participate is very easy to become active in the community, when there's nobody else kind of making, you know, having an advantage of you earning more money or something because of your contribution, anybody who's here and want to contribute is actually just doing that because they believe in the project and they want to do so. And, and, and that makes it very easy for new people to come in, come in and get involved. It becomes also a self-selection

exercise. I noticed like, we have a great community and I think part of it is because there's no get-rich-quick scheme here. And you know, we don't have to pay people to do the work, it takes care of itself and ultimately, as well, you know, I'm not some people ask, you know, there's always this kind of quick questions. Is that the right way? Is the sustainable, will it last? And so on, well, it's completely

up to the community, right? If nobody wants to fund us then, you know, maybe maybe there will be fewer development developers unless development going on, if nobody cares about that, but I guess it wasn't very popular in the first place, but if people do care, About that. And they want to actually take a grin forward, then anybody can participate in do that. So it's like a it's like a non-issue for me in a way. So you don't see any issues with.

I mean I can see how this story right now is super peeling this. Oh, it's Wind currently, no one actually makes huge amounts of monies building businesses on grin, but once they're actually active people who actively benefit from the grid Network and build business on businesses on it. Do you think the the volunteers will still be there to actually build the infrastructure where they feel exploited? And with us turned into a tragedy of the commons situation. I don't know.

I think, I think it depends a little bit. I think it, but I think it depends on the businesses, how they act in the community. What what kind of how they operate as you know, if I was starting a business, you know, wondering you know the stuff we're doing for example, with with green box and Baltimore, 32 all fully open for anybody to use. If you're a business and you make money off grid, it's kind of in your interest to contribute to the default, right?

Because you know it's your protocol that you making money from. So it kind of makes sense for you to ensure that somebody's looking The protocol the protocol level. So for what we're seeing is that exchanges mining pools, you know, proof-of-work, mining software providers are contributing and they're making contributions. I can't say whether it's going

to be enough or not. It's very early days we'll see about that but you know it really is up to everybody else everybody involved to actually put excuse me to contribute and and I don't I'm not too worried about it and and then you know, just because there are companies that there that make money,

right? We saw they should be doing that if they're offering value to the community, that shouldn't preclude Community member to to contribute if they want to on their spare time, on something else, some other corner of the of the protocol but the difference is I guess with other setups is that if we for example as developers we're taking twenty percent tax on all coins. Ever mind that creates this very weird relationship between us and the rest of the community.

Right? Because it's also something we have a stake in improving the value of the coin which is not necessarily what is in the interest of the community. Right? We we suddenly if we get 20% of all the coins then it's really in our interest to just raise the price of the coin all the time and the kind of focus on that whereas maybe what we should be looking at is adoption or you know, getting it making more users using the coin that doesn't necessarily drive up the price of the coin.

Do you see what I mean? It kind of has like, a weird. Assertive alignment. Yeah, I agree that it's really difficult to find Morris that in Center that the line incentives. Well, but saying at you trust in the good in companies to me that that seems it didn't Eve. I mean, if you look at the off chain word, for instance, Apple massively bills on public infrastructure and applicant only exist because there are

structures. Structures that preceded it like the the judicial system and the road infrastructure and the internet but other major corporations have ways of circumventing paying tax and and I mean they in principle they're liable to pay tax but somehow they still end up paying very little or close to not know taxes, right?

I mean I can't comment on that. I can't comment on whether apple pays a lot of tax for not, but but I guess the point is that generally speaking, the whole purpose is green as a project was to be very minimal on the like the top layer protocol. Right, in order for that to kind of make sense intuitively.

It means that, you know, other entities, underneath need to kind of step up to the plate and deliver products and services to help to facilitate that because it's very minimal of the top layer because it's very minimal the top layer. It shouldn't be needing. 20% of all the coins of my mind to sustain itself, right? It's the whole that's the kind of the whole idea of it. I appreciate the idea and I think it's super idealistic and I really hope it works.

So I'm not holding against you. I'm just, yeah, I'm just, I'm just asking whether your work and I also like, you know, companies that can approach us and they kind of say, hey, we want to get involved. We want to do this, want to do that. How can we do? How can we get more involved in Grid? And I say that like if you contribute to the community that fund, The greatest way to create Goodwill and add in marketing for your company in, in the community right by just kind of

making active contributions. And of course, companies can choose not to do that. But mean that stands for themselves and I know, you know, I understand that you might think it sounds idealistic or naive, but I actually don't think there's a better way to do this. I don't think it's better to crew to stop. It's like a death tax or something. I don't think that's gonna lead to longer term success. For grain and what its long-term objectives are.

If you start off with a Dev talks and that's how you're going to fund, then you will always be painted with developers to work on the chain for those reasons like, why am I going to put my time into make someone else to have someone else profit off the end of it? I know it kind of sounds a bit naive and there seems to be I've seen criticism of the internet again. No it's not going to work because you need to pay developer, but I think we've it's been around for two years now.

The interest is still growing personally. I'm I mean, I've been funded for for the past year and unfunded again for the next next six or seven months to work on a full-time in order at a regular developer salary. And I think, and this is early days. I said before the chamber's even launched in people had their businesses that they were going to build on top of great. So I think the early signs are encouraging anyhow. I think what we're seeing with exact exchanges is an example,

right? We're not actually. I mean we welcome and encourage all exchanges to to list us that want to and if they have questions will help them and so on but we're not really chasing exchanges. We're not applying for exchanges, we're not filling out any documents, there's no legal entity, nobody can give any money for listing fees or anything to exchanges, because we're broke, we don't have any money, right?

So instead of changes list us without us asking and without any preconditions, but we had like a pot of gold. That we were sitting on which was like equating to a chunk of the total coins, mind the head, think the story would have been very different. Yeah. So I mean, and certainly they have been open source projects that have been going on for tens of years and they're still around. So I'm interested to see what the future holds for you guys. Thank you for coming on.

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