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Does Grin do something concrete and useful? I ask this question because someone on HN reminded me of this great 2001 article from Joel "Nostramdamus" Spolsky o

Does Grin do something concrete and useful? I ask this question because someone on HN reminded me of this great 2001 article from Joel "Nostramdamus" Spolsky on Blockchain Astronauts: > Don't let Architecture Astronauts Scare You https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architecture-astronauts-scare-you/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect... > When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all. > These are the people I call Architecture Astronauts > The Architecture Astronauts will say things like: “Can you imagine a program like Napster where you can download anything, not just songs?” Then they’ll build applications like Groove that they think are more general than Napster, but which seem to have neglected that wee little feature that lets you type the name of a song and then listen to it — the feature we wanted in the first place. Talk about missing the point. If Napster wasn’t peer-to-peer but it did let you type the name of a song and then listen to it, it would have been just as popular. What's the equivalent for Grin of "that wee little feature that lets you type the name of a song and then listen to it" ?

rdl 8y ago
The product is anonymous/private payments at a distance, without a central trusted party — ie the holy grail of the cypherpunks, although grin only approaches this ideal. The reason Napster made more sense than a single central server is that what it was doing was explicitly violating copyright law. At the time, there was no real possibility of licensing music for distribution online, even in a pay per song model. The only reason RIAA/etc caved and allowed both download services and streaming services was the success of early private services. This is like questioning why Silk Road needed all the infrastructure when you could just list your illegal drugs for sale on eBay.
- garmaine 8y ago
  I wouldn’t call anonymous payments “the holy grail of the cypherpunks”. If anything that probably has more to do with secure anonymous communication generally than something specific like payments which only a subset of the cypherpunk space ever cared about.
  - rdl 8y ago
    Money is speech, but financial transactions are the primary communications which actually affect the world, and the only kind which governments have gone completely insane to try to restrict at any scale historically, as well as the only kind which were particularly challenging to accomplish with non cryptographic means, but at a distance, in 1988-1992 (and on to today.). All other communications can be a subset of financial transactions.
    - garmaine 8y ago
      > All other communications can be a subset of financial transactions. Sending personal letters, or photos of a dissident demonstration are financial transactions?
      - rdl 8y ago
        If you can send a payment instruction, you could send a 0-value transaction textual message. Ability to do true anonymous electronic cash implies the ability to do everything else.
        tromp 8y ago
        Grin leaves no room for adding any publicly visible message to your transaction.
        rkowal 8y ago
        I'd say if u can send Grin via email/mobile easily cause of no scripting and it is truly digital cash that is private censoroship-resistant/decentralized p2p distributed ledger then this is big
        Winslow_Strong 8y ago
        Beam is incorporating a BBS system that presumably could be used for secure communications as well (ow how could it be secure for setting up a tx?). Won't Grin have to do something similar that would support secure messaging in order for users to build txs in a secure and easy way?
- yholio 8y ago
  I think it's incredibly naive to believe that the main problem of cryptocurrency today is the lack of privacy. The ease of which you can launder crypto is the main obstacle against it's widespread integration into the financial system. Sure, a Bitcoin transaction might leak an address, an amount or an IP. So what? Coupling Tor with a trusted coin tumbler, any serious criminal can hide his tracks, so if cryptocurrency is to become just as good as "money in the bank", then he is home free. Grin proposes to optimize that further and provide similar levels of anonymity to average users who don't really ask for it - talk about missing the point. The wholly grail of cryptocurrency today is not optimizing anonymity but gaining legitimacy and working as a payment system parallel to national currencies while complying with the complex regulations around KYC and criminal and terrorist financing. These are vigorously enforced in any first world nation, for sound, historic reasons. The wholly grail is to opt out of government surveillance while maintaining social responsibility and capacity to root out bad actors. This will probably require a mixed, technological, institutional and regulatory response if it is ever to be realized. Abstracting the real world away and hiding in your little cryptographic fantasy governed only by math and not people will leave you with speculative playmoney in the best case and a dangerous can of worms in the worst.
  - StreamBright 8y ago
    Well Bitcoin is completely unsuitable for handling transactions for many reasons (transaction time, energy consumption, just to name a few). Btw. until you are going through internet devices (routers) with your transactions government surveillance is there, so it does not solve that either. The reason why even security aware people think that cryptocurrency guys are nuts is exactly this reason, you think that you can outsmart an adversary that has unlimited resources (at least compare to you). If you look at recent developments in Australia you would understand that you cannot do anything against a government than vote the right people into power and apply pressure to politicians to end unlimited surveillance that is granted with laws like the Patriot Act. "Coupling Tor with a trusted coin tumbler, any serious criminal can hide his tracks" They absolutely cannot. Their tracks are in the the NSA database in Utah. Tor is great for one thing mark yourself suspicious so it is easier to track you down. https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/interview-in-german-magazine-konkret-about-tor-and-the-cult-of-crypto https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/interview-in-german-maga... https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nzemvg/dont-just-rely-on-tor-security-advice-from-an-alleged-dark-web-veteran https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nzemvg/dont-just-... https://boingboing.net/2016/07/01/researchers-find-over-100-spyi.html https://boingboing.net/2016/07/01/researchers-find-over-100-... TL;DR version for the inpatient "It all depends on who you are trying to protect yourself from. The biggest forces of surveillance in the world are not governments, but private corporations: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Apple — companies whose core business runs on the surveillance and profiling of every person that comes into contact with their platforms. Everything that you communicate on the Internet gets sucked up and filed away — not by the NSA, but by Google and Facebook. Tor does nothing to protect people from that. Tor does not prevent Google from scanning your emails or recording your search history. Tor does not prevent Google from tracking your location via your Android phone, creating and saving a detailed day by day map of where you go and what you do. Tor works to an extent. If you an individual trying to hide from the NSA or the FBI or the FSB, Tor might give you some measure of protection — if you are very technically savvy — but it is a limited sort of protection. It does not protect users against corporate surveillance. But it does provide a false sense of privacy. That is why Silicon Valley companies like Google and Facebook support Tor: it sells a version of privacy — privacy from the government — that does not threaten their own surveillance business models."
Meai 8y ago
According to some other comments that wee little feature is the act of actually transferring money. Apparently you can't just send and receive money easily, you have to do it by sending files to the other person. Sounds insane, doesn't it? But your comment about the song name typing really made me laugh and think about this.
sweetcirucs 8y ago
This is exactly my thought process. Specailized frameworks - like Napster as specifically a song sharing platform in your example was successful because it coupled architecture with a real life usecase. Architect/Engineers see this and think a generic version is far supieror from a mechanical point. On paper, that is true (e.g. scaling or market reach) but it presents a viability-of-use problem that you end up constantly trying to adjust to the massive wide variety of usecases.

rdl 8y ago

The product is anonymous/private payments at a distance, without a central trusted party — ie the holy grail of the cypherpunks, although grin only approaches this ideal. The reason Napster made more sense than a single central server is that what it was doing was explicitly violating copyright law. At the time, there was no real possibility of licensing music for distribution online, even in a pay per song model. The only reason RIAA/etc caved and allowed both download services and streaming services was the success of early private services. This is like questioning why Silk Road needed all the infrastructure when you could just list your illegal drugs for sale on eBay.

garmaine 8y ago
I wouldn’t call anonymous payments “the holy grail of the cypherpunks”. If anything that probably has more to do with secure anonymous communication generally than something specific like payments which only a subset of the cypherpunk space ever cared about.
- rdl 8y ago
  Money is speech, but financial transactions are the primary communications which actually affect the world, and the only kind which governments have gone completely insane to try to restrict at any scale historically, as well as the only kind which were particularly challenging to accomplish with non cryptographic means, but at a distance, in 1988-1992 (and on to today.). All other communications can be a subset of financial transactions.
  - garmaine 8y ago
    > All other communications can be a subset of financial transactions. Sending personal letters, or photos of a dissident demonstration are financial transactions?
    - rdl 8y ago
      If you can send a payment instruction, you could send a 0-value transaction textual message. Ability to do true anonymous electronic cash implies the ability to do everything else.
      - tromp 8y ago
        Grin leaves no room for adding any publicly visible message to your transaction.
        rkowal 8y ago
        I'd say if u can send Grin via email/mobile easily cause of no scripting and it is truly digital cash that is private censoroship-resistant/decentralized p2p distributed ledger then this is big
        Winslow_Strong 8y ago
        Beam is incorporating a BBS system that presumably could be used for secure communications as well (ow how could it be secure for setting up a tx?). Won't Grin have to do something similar that would support secure messaging in order for users to build txs in a secure and easy way?
yholio 8y ago
I think it's incredibly naive to believe that the main problem of cryptocurrency today is the lack of privacy. The ease of which you can launder crypto is the main obstacle against it's widespread integration into the financial system. Sure, a Bitcoin transaction might leak an address, an amount or an IP. So what? Coupling Tor with a trusted coin tumbler, any serious criminal can hide his tracks, so if cryptocurrency is to become just as good as "money in the bank", then he is home free. Grin proposes to optimize that further and provide similar levels of anonymity to average users who don't really ask for it - talk about missing the point. The wholly grail of cryptocurrency today is not optimizing anonymity but gaining legitimacy and working as a payment system parallel to national currencies while complying with the complex regulations around KYC and criminal and terrorist financing. These are vigorously enforced in any first world nation, for sound, historic reasons. The wholly grail is to opt out of government surveillance while maintaining social responsibility and capacity to root out bad actors. This will probably require a mixed, technological, institutional and regulatory response if it is ever to be realized. Abstracting the real world away and hiding in your little cryptographic fantasy governed only by math and not people will leave you with speculative playmoney in the best case and a dangerous can of worms in the worst.
- StreamBright 8y ago
  Well Bitcoin is completely unsuitable for handling transactions for many reasons (transaction time, energy consumption, just to name a few). Btw. until you are going through internet devices (routers) with your transactions government surveillance is there, so it does not solve that either. The reason why even security aware people think that cryptocurrency guys are nuts is exactly this reason, you think that you can outsmart an adversary that has unlimited resources (at least compare to you). If you look at recent developments in Australia you would understand that you cannot do anything against a government than vote the right people into power and apply pressure to politicians to end unlimited surveillance that is granted with laws like the Patriot Act. "Coupling Tor with a trusted coin tumbler, any serious criminal can hide his tracks" They absolutely cannot. Their tracks are in the the NSA database in Utah. Tor is great for one thing mark yourself suspicious so it is easier to track you down. https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/interview-in-german-magazine-konkret-about-tor-and-the-cult-of-crypto https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/interview-in-german-maga... https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nzemvg/dont-just-rely-on-tor-security-advice-from-an-alleged-dark-web-veteran https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nzemvg/dont-just-... https://boingboing.net/2016/07/01/researchers-find-over-100-spyi.html https://boingboing.net/2016/07/01/researchers-find-over-100-... TL;DR version for the inpatient "It all depends on who you are trying to protect yourself from. The biggest forces of surveillance in the world are not governments, but private corporations: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Apple — companies whose core business runs on the surveillance and profiling of every person that comes into contact with their platforms. Everything that you communicate on the Internet gets sucked up and filed away — not by the NSA, but by Google and Facebook. Tor does nothing to protect people from that. Tor does not prevent Google from scanning your emails or recording your search history. Tor does not prevent Google from tracking your location via your Android phone, creating and saving a detailed day by day map of where you go and what you do. Tor works to an extent. If you an individual trying to hide from the NSA or the FBI or the FSB, Tor might give you some measure of protection — if you are very technically savvy — but it is a limited sort of protection. It does not protect users against corporate surveillance. But it does provide a false sense of privacy. That is why Silicon Valley companies like Google and Facebook support Tor: it sells a version of privacy — privacy from the government — that does not threaten their own surveillance business models."

Meai 8y ago

According to some other comments that wee little feature is the act of actually transferring money. Apparently you can't just send and receive money easily, you have to do it by sending files to the other person. Sounds insane, doesn't it? But your comment about the song name typing really made me laugh and think about this.

sweetcirucs 8y ago

This is exactly my thought process. Specailized frameworks - like Napster as specifically a song sharing platform in your example was successful because it coupled architecture with a real life usecase. Architect/Engineers see this and think a generic version is far supieror from a mechanical point. On paper, that is true (e.g. scaling or market reach) but it presents a viability-of-use problem that you end up constantly trying to adjust to the massive wide variety of usecases.