Daniel Lehnberg & Michael Cordner: Grin – Cypherpunk Mimblewimble

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Three years ago, a mysterious txt file signed by a pseudonymous Tom Elvis Jedusor was dropped in the Bitcoin-Wizards IRC channel outlining a proposal called Mimblewimble. It proposed a novel way of combining many ideas from Bitcoin research in order to create a new blockchain protocol that will be highly scalable and increase privacy, while still using the same cryptographic assumptions as Bitcoin. A few months later this project was picked up by another pseudonymous individual who started working on an implementation he called Grin. Grin slowly began to draw attention from the Bitcoin community and got a lot of traction.

We join Michael Cordner (Yeastplume) and Daniel Lehnberg, two of the core developers of the Grin blockchain. In this episode we discuss some topics around Grin’s cypherpunk origins, privacy and scalability features, no-premine fair start, and interesting monetary policy.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Origins of the Mimblewimble proposal and the prior work it draws upon
• Andrew Poelstra’s contributions to improving and fixing the original proposal
• Scalability and fast sync times achieved through mimblewimble’s UTXO set compression
• How UTXO compression when combined with the Dandellion p2p protocol can increase privacy
• Changes in user experience from Bitcoin to Mimblewimble
• Beginning of the Grin project as an implementation of the Mimblewimble protocol
• Comparision to BEAM, a competing Mimblewimble implementation
• Innovating on fair Proof of Work through dual Cuckoo Cycle
• Grin’s Monetary Policy and the Mining Fair Start

Episode links:

• MimbleWimble Origin
• Andrew Poelstra's Improved Paper
• Introduction to Grin
• Grin for Bitcoiners
• Grin Newsletter
• Michael Cordner on Twitter
• Daniel Lehnberg on Twitter

Thank you to our sponsors for their support:

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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/278