It has been a while since I have written anything for this blog. For now, I will spare you the details of what was happening in the meantime. Briefly, I escaped from China and moved back to Poland. I started a company named square root of XX and if you checked Majorana Qubits article you might have an idea of the origin of this name. I have also defended my Ph.D. thesis. You can imagine there was not much time left for this blog.

Nevertheless, I remained active in ツ GRIN Community, and yesterday, July 23rd, 2022 I met @davidtavarez and @crypto_nagini. They came to Warsaw, Poland, which is where I am based currently and we spent a nice day together, had some food, drinks, and lots of discussions. The purpose of this blog post is to summarize our discussions for you guys. Among the requests, we have been asked to discuss

  1. fixing money with linear emission
  2. Adoption. Is it something that will happen naturally or are there things that the community need to do?
  3. 1-Grin is digital gold or cash? 2-grin is store of value?

Unfortunately we were not able to comment much on (1) and (2) because we are not experts on economy and our discussions we mostly releted to technical issues and community building.

photo of us having breakfast

Bounties

It has been a while since ツ introduced bounty program. Apart from the General Fund there is specific budget dedicated for those bounties and it is governed by the GRIN Community Council.

One of our conclusions was that bounties are difficult to fund real GitHub issues. My personal opinion was that real issues are more suitable for people who are paid full time. Reason for that is, it is very difficult to estimate the complexity of the problem and thus, difficult to offer an adequate bounty for the specific issue.

Given how competitive hiring in IT is, regardless of the huge budget we have it will remain hard hiring developers and work on those issues. There are many people willing to learn and they would like a chance to learn and grow and they would not mind spending their extra time learning new technology, such as ツ or Rust Programming Language. Especially if they could be paid. My suggestion was to create a tool similar to Hacker Rank or Code Wars where users could solve GRIN-related coding challenges and get rewarded with GRIN coins. The reward would be adequate to hardness of the problem, problem could be randomized to avoid someone automatically draining the budget. The value from such tool would be A mainnet faucet that would allow people to get some ツ for start, An interactive way to spread knowledge about Mimblewimble technology, A starting point for potential future developers - a fraction of users would manage to complete all the challenges and we could encourage them to start solving real issues for money. Another important thing about bounties we have discussed is they matter even for people who love the tech and would be willing to work on it for free in their spare time. I helped out @rustic_cyborg building OCTA project during the first zkApp builders program. The project was interesting enough to work on with no rewards at all, yet having a reward offer made this project competitive when it comes to dedicated time. If we do cool projects for free we still need to earn some money yet if those cool projects come with a bounty it makes it possible for us to drop some other tasks we would do exclusively for income in favor of those cool projects we are interested in. That is another argument in favor of the bounty program.

Community support rewards bot

Recently I have started working on slatepack Telegram bot. @davidtavarez told me he is overwhelmed with support work for GRIN++ wallet. Often those questions are simple and anyone with minimum experience could answer those. This gave me an idea to fork the Telegram bot, or design it in a more customizable way, to turn it into a support bot.

Imagine you have some question about ツ or something is not working for you. You could ask a question in Telegram group and fund this question with ツ. Once you approve someone’s answer this perso would be able to withdraw this reward. The benefits from that are Take some weight of developers in answering simple questions, A source of ツ income for community members who are able to answer simpler questions and help out.

Community meetings

On Tuesday, July 19th, 2022 we have spontaenously organized an online meeting and invited ツ community people to join in and discuss. During our meeting in Warsaw we discussed it and we believe such meetings have positive impact on community building and we agreed they should occurr on regular basis.

Using budget for marketing and other non-technical matters

During our discussions regarding community growth matters and general well-beign of our community members my impression was we all feel proud of not being a corporate project. Yet, at same time we felt we lack of certain structures that make developers and other community members simply feel good because there are people hired to manage the community, write news, organize events etc. That was particular point I raised mentioning this is the aspect of Mina Protocol community I enjoy a lot and I lack it in ツ Mimblewimble community.

We have people applying for funding for non-tech work, excellent example would be cekickafa and satoshocrat who do excellent work for our community. While discussing those issues, I feel we agreed we would love to have more of such requests and perhaps we should consider dedicating more budged for those kind of innitiatives.

Conclusion

Our gathering was extremely pleasant experience. We had great discussions, enjoyed nice food and drinks. I thank both @crypto_nagini and @davidtavarez for showing up in Warsaw for this and I look forward for another chance to meet more members of our community. I did my best to summarize our discussions, please keep in mind this is just how I remember it. I encourage and look forward to have my guests write their own summaries of what they took out of our little gathering.

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