Describe the difference between GRIN’s and BEAM’s…
Funding
“Grin is structured as a research project. They do not receive any outside funding except for donations, they do it part-time, they’re doing it very slowly.
Beam sought VC funding and hired a team of developers to work on the software full-time, allowing it to speed ahead of Grin in its implementation.
Governance
Beam takes its example from privacy-centric cryptocurrency zcash, maintaining a corporate structure, and funneling a portion of the block reward into a Foundation to support the blockchain’s development.
“Beam is a professional effort to create a privacy coin, there is an alignment of incentives within the block rewards so that the project won’t die,”
Grin takes a different approach, relying on a community funding model that is similar to the one utilized by the monero project. And while it’s a less reliable income source, Grin sees this as an advantage that ultimately increases the security of the project.
“The project has a firm commitment to not engage in any ICO, pre-mine, founder’s rewards, or similar activities,” Yeastplume wrote in a statement, adding:
“We are not driven by profit or corporate interests. We’re open-source and community-driven by design.”
Target Customer
“Having a GUI wallet and mobile wallet will increase adoption, increase number of transactions and usage and will thus increase the anonymity set,” Corem told CoinDesk.
In addition to being designed from a user-friendly perspective, the wallet boasts implementations in different operating systems, including MacOS, Windows, and Linux. Beam will also release a light client alongside its mainnet release
Grin, however, currently only offers a command-line wallet, and is less accessible for non-technical users.
“We’ll have a fairly well-tested MimbleWimble chain and a relatively stable and tested command-line wallet out, with all sorts of features in varying states of development to assist the community in creating unique transaction exchange solutions and other crucial infrastructure,” Yeastplume told CoinDesk:
“It’s still very much aimed at a technical crowd, and will be very much ‘use at your own risk’, especially in the early days.
Emission Schedules
Beam sees itself as a “store of value” coin that has a fixed issuance schedule akin to bitcoin.
“We wanted to create a confidential store of value coin, the emission to be limited,”
By contrast, Grin’s monetary policy is unfixed. Currently, a new token is issued every second. This is due to the project’s belief that sustained issuance will stabilize the value of the currency.
“We want Grin to be a currency, not a ‘store of value’ (whatever that actually means in the ridiculously volatile crypto space),” Yeastplume said. “We want to encourage use, and we don’t want to unfairly reward early adopters with an arbitrary deflationary halving schedule.”
What is the key privacy concern of both, and what feature do they implement to deal with this?
Concerns that both implementations may potentially be vulnerable to machine-learning analysis – due to the design’s failure to conceal inputs and outputs – are also under discussion.
While both teams currently implement a privacy feature named Dandelion to better conceal these potential leaks, there may be other experimental efforts that can be concluded as well going forward.
To support such changes, both cryptocurrencies will undergo regular system-wide software upgrades, or hard forks, in their early days.
Corem said that he hopes to see Mimblewimble implemented as trustless, privacy-centric sidechain for other cryptocurrencies, adding:
“Mimblewimble is putting the pressure on other cryptocurrencies to adapt and find the right tradeoffs, creating a net positive to the ecosystem.”
