Grin, a new privacy cryptocurrency that uses the mimblewimble technology, had its first block mined and gone live on mainnet.
Grin is a blockchain/cryptocurrency focused on privacy and scalability that wants to change the way we use digital money. Founded and developed by a community effort, this project is based on the revolutionary MimbleWimble protocol. To understand what exactly this cryptocurrency wants to do, we need to take a closer look at the underlying technology first.
The pre-launch time saw the new coin being widely shilled by some “legitimate” personas in the crypto space, aptly described by a Twitter crypto analyst under a moniker CryptoDog:
There are rumours that serious cash has flown into the mining equipment for the new cryptocurrency, with videos of stacked up miners ready to mine Grin circle around:
Grin block contains no transactions; the block itself looks like one big transaction. Also, all the original associations between input and output are lost and mixed with others. Due to all of this, the currency’s blockchain is extremely lightweight and doesn’t require much hard disk space to be stored.
A single new coin will be mined each second on average and this rate will not change over time.
Worth an investment?
The hype around it is strong so knowing the patterns of behaviour of crypto investors, it is bound to pump hard once it hits exchanges.
However, there is one catch with Grin that is a reason for concern for the monetary purists.
The currency will employ inflation as a percentage of existing supply; this inflation will be high early on but gradually lowers over time, approaching zero percent but never actually reaching that. This inflation will be less than 10% during the first 10 years, then less than 5% after 20 years, and will continually drop across time. This signals that Grin isn’t looking to emulate Bitcoin as a limited supply currency. Grin community feels that mining networks of Bitcoin and similar limited supply currencies might react in unpredictable ways once the last coin of each respective network is mined out and therefore feel that inflation is necessary to motivate the miners infinitely.
If you have some spare bitcoins laying around and your risk-aversion is low, throwing some coins at it might be a good idea and a way to outpace the market that is still in deep hibernation.
But don’t fall for the overblown and flimsy narratives that Grin will displace bitcoin. Its privacy features are nice and a major improvement over bitcoin but the brand recognition, network effects, trustworthiness, Lindy effect and pretty much every other factor is on bitcoin’s side so Grin stands no chance in that battle.
Yeah, Skipper… the inflation is not a percentage of existing supply. It’s a constant drip of 1 grin / second; in perpetuity. Otherwise, good read.