Grin goes viral: A cypherpunk revival, a spontaneous hype

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(ID: iqklbs), author: Hu Tao, editor: Gong Quanyu, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.

After a long period of sluggishness, depression and weakness, the blockchain industry finally ushered in the topical and innovative new projects Beam and Grin at the beginning of 2019, and the latter even became a large number of blockchain developers. "Bitcoin 2.0" in the eyes of investors and miners.

In fact, Grin was born as early as November 2016, which is ahead of many current popular currencies. However, due to the fact that most of the core members are anonymous, there is no ICO, and there is no marketing, etc., it has not been able to enter the public until the mainnet launch recently. vision. Compared with Bitcoin, Grin's total issuance has no upper limit and maintains a linear supply, and the speed of mining coins remains unchanged, which means that Grin hopes to create an inflationary economic model.

At the same time, Grin adopts the same POW mechanism as Bitcoin, but its mining algorithm does not support the ASIC algorithm in the early stage, and encourages graphics card miners to become the main body of mining to avoid excessive concentration of Bitcoin computing power. The bigger adjustment lies in anonymity. Grin uses MimbleWimble's privacy-protecting blockchain format to hide transaction data such as addresses and funds through homomorphic encryption, ensuring the complete anonymity and privacy of traders under the premise of system security.

To a certain extent, Grin's various mechanism settings bear the style imprint of Bitcoin's early days, emphasizing fairness, privacy, and community, and have also been recognized and praised by many blockchain practitioners and even Bitcoin core developers. Jameson, a core development member of Bitcoin, said: "Because the project does not treat the creators specially, this approach is an innovation, and this is a project with a cypherpunk spirit."

The so-called punk spirit originated from the rebellious movement of some young bands in the UK in the 1970s to express their dissatisfaction with social reality, and later extended to a synonym for specific groups rebelling against tradition, rebelling against the system, and rebelling against boring and meaningless life. It is anti-social and anarchic at the same time. doctrine tendencies.

The cypherpunk mentioned by Jameson first appeared in the 1990s, and was jointly created by a large number of cryptography scholars in gatherings and discussions. Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto was also one of the early believers in the cypherpunk concept. They believe in using encryption algorithms to ensure the security, anonymity and privacy of personal information, and oppose any government-regulated cryptosystem.

In the discourse system of the blockchain, this punk spirit is undoubtedly endowed with more connotations. Concepts such as distributed accounting, community autonomy, and algorithmic fairness have emerged, and tendencies such as centralization and centralization have become objects of resistance.

In the early stage of the birth of the blockchain, projects such as Bitcoin with idealism are the best embodiment of this punk spirit: everyone can participate in bookkeeping, use cryptography to ensure the anonymity of funds and transactions, etc., And with this, it drives the rise of the entire blockchain industry.

However, the development path of the blockchain industry since then has exceeded the expectations of early developers. Performance, supervision, and privileges have gradually become factors that blockchain developers pay more attention to. Concepts such as decentralization and fairness have gradually faded from the original aura. For cryptocurrency fundamentalists, it could mean that the very things they despised earlier are eroding the blockchain, which is also a disaster.

Taking the past year as an example, although Bitcoin is still the undisputed overlord of the blockchain industry, projects such as EOS and Tron have obviously become a party of princes and have many crowds. Most of these emerging projects adopt the DPOS mechanism or its variants , Dozens of super nodes control the bookkeeping rights and produce blocks. At the same time, in terms of development and operation, specific companies actually occupy a leading position. The centralization is quite serious. Even some developers think that EOS does not belong to the zone It is not a blockchain project, but a centralized cloud computing institution.

From the perspective of the industry environment, ICOs in the blockchain industry have been prevalent and hyped over the past few years, and tens of thousands of low-quality air coins have been derived. Most blockchain practitioners may have thrown away the true concept of blockchain. In the back of the mind, the blockchain is regarded as a tool for individuals and teams to make profits, which has greatly deteriorated the ecosystem of the blockchain industry, and this time the currency market is deeply bearish.

The Grin mainnet is going live at such a point in time. In this period full of disappointment and confusion, the various settings of Grin seem to perfectly fit the punk spirit of the early developers of the blockchain, and are even more "hard-core" than Bitcoin. "Punk", which not only attracted the deep participation of many early blockchain developers, but also made many blockchain practitioners shine, and then became the hottest topic and object of attention in the entire blockchain industry.For the Grin development team, they believe that the value of Grin will stabilize after large-scale issuance, and users will be more willing to use it instead of hoarding it speculatively. Grin will become a low-inflation currency that is more suitable for value exchange than Bitcoin . So, does Grin really hope to challenge the status of Bitcoin? What impact will Grin bring to the industry?As pointed out by most analysts, due to Grin's infinite inflation mechanism,. In this case, most investors will lack the willingness to purchase Grin, which is the prerequisite for most users to use Grin.

and,The time required for Grin's large-scale popularization and circulation may be greatly slowed down, and its vision of becoming a universal payment currency may be even more distant.and,

Grin's strong anonymity may also make it difficult to be recognized by the government

. In contrast, although Bitcoin also has anonymity, its transaction traceability weakens its anonymity effect to a certain extent. It is for this reason that Bitcoin is recognized as a currency by some countries or included in the scope of supervision. This will be Grin An important disadvantage for further expansion in the future.

At present, Grin has also become the target of speculation by some miners, developers and investors. After experiencing the sharp drop in Bitcoin, they urgently need new targets with potential to activate the market. Grin's "hard core" temperament and their hype The needs coincided with each other.Although this is not a well-planned hype, but a spontaneous hype, it still caused great harm to Grin itself. Its price has shown a trend of sharp rise and fall, with a drop of up to 97%. A large number of investors Get hooked and fall prey to this hype.

With the sharp drop in currency prices and the gradual rise of doubts, the enthusiasm for Grin for many days is gradually fading.