Grin's Michael Cordner aka Yeastplume on Implementing Mimblewimble

Mr Obnoxious - Un pódcast de Peter McCormack

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Interview location: Skype
Interview date: Friday 30th Nov, 2018
Project: Grin
Role: Developer

Outside of the most hardcore Bitcoin maximalists, there are some who respect a minimal number of alternative cryptocurrency projects. My experience in creating this podcast is that you find some who say they are maximalists, but Monero is cool, or that Decred is interesting.

The ability to command respect is usually steeped in a currencies foundation sharing characteristics of Bitcoin:
- An anonymous founder
- A focus on decentralisation
- A monetary policy which does not enrich the founders and developers
- No premine

One such project which has sparked interest is Grin’s implementation of Mimblewimble, a new coin which attempts to solve some of the privacy and scaling issues of Bitcoin.

On August 2nd, 2016, Tom Elvis Jedusor, a contributor to the Bitcoin Wizards IRC channel dropped his whitepaper, describing a blockchain with a radically different approach to transaction construction from Bitcoin. In October 2016, Andrew Poelstra from Blockstream completed his analysis of the whitepaper and dropped a position paper filling in some of the gaps from the original paper to make precise the idea.

In the middle of November, Ignotus Peverell, another anonymous developer, appeared on the same IRC channel with a link to GitHub with an implementation of Mimblewimble, and this is how Grin was born.

Fast forward to today and Grin has launched its fourth testnet and is preparing to launch its mainnet in January of next year.

In this interview I talk with Michael Cordner, aka Yeastplumer, a developer working on the Grin implementation of Mumblewimble, we discuss why Grin is acceptable for some Bitcoiners, their approach to monetary policy and governance, and how to mine Grin.

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Timestamps:
00.02.48: Intro and welcome
00.03.40: Why Grin has been accepted by Bitcoiners
00.06.15: The mysterious background of Mimblewimble
00.09.38: The key technical aspects of Mimblewimble
00.23.30: Mining Grin
00.28.35: Mining the Grin genesis block and difficulty
00.29.15: Grin’s monetary policy
00.34.45: Privacy and KYC/AML
00.35.50: Governance structure
00.37.58: Grincon
00.39.42: Funding for Grin
00.44.08: Excitement around Grin
00.46.03: The challenge of implementing Mimblewimble on Bitcoin
00.46.35: Preparing for the launch of Grin and developing the wallet
00.47.42: How people can get involved in supporting Grin