Tale of Two Coins - Reading Assignment

Privacy Coins - Ultimate Course
#121

Funding- Grin had no token premine or ICO, relied on voluteer developers, Beam sought VC funding and hired full time developers
Governance-Beam is more of a professional network with financial incentives to maintain the network to ensure it won’t die, Grin relies more on a community with less financial incentive, which they believe make them more private.
Target Customer-Beam seeks a wider audience by making everything more user freindly Grin is aimed at a more technical crowd.
Emission Schedules-Beam limits emission and aims to be a store of valume, Grim creates new coins every second and wants to be more of a currency.
Key privacy concern-both are vulnerable to machine learning analysis, they implement Dandelion for this issue.

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#122

Continuing the discussion from Tale of Two Coins - Reading Assignment:

  1. A) Funding:

GRIN: community funding
BEAM: VC funding

B) Governance:
GRIN: relies on community like Monero
BEAM: relies on privacy-centric governance like Zcash

C) Target consumers:

GRIN: targeted to more technical people as interface of the wallet looks like command line
BEAM: targeted at non-technical audience as UI of the wallet is simple

D) Emission:
GRIN: monetary policy is unfixed - more like real money
BEAM: monetary policy is fixed - more like ‘store of value’ - limited supply (Bitcoin)

  1. Key privacy concern - might be vulnerable to Machine learning analysis when inputs and outputs of the transactions can be discovered. They implemented Dandelion upgrade to obscure the original IP address of a bitcoin sender.
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#123

1.Funding. Grin -community funding, donations; Beam -funded by VC.
2. Governance - Grin -decentralized community; Beam -centralized corporate structure.
3. Target Customer - Grin - technical users; Beam -users with no or limited technical knowledge.
4. Emission Schedules - Grin - new token issued every second; Beam - fixed issuance schedule akin to Bitcoin.

  1. The key privacy concern is the vulnerability to machine-learning analysis. Both implemented Dandelion to better conceal potential leaks of inputs and outputs.
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#124

  1. Funding: GRIN: Community donations
    BEAM: VC Funding
    Governance: GRIN: Community funding model
    BEAM: Corporate structure
    Target Customers: GRIN: Technical users
    BEAM: users of limited technical ability
    Emissions: GRIN: New token issued every second
    BEAM: Fixed issuance schedule

  2. Both implementations may be vulnerable to machine learning analysis due to the design’s failure to conceal inputs and outputs.
    Dandelion implementation.

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#125

1. Describe the difference between GRIN’s and BEAM’s…
a. Funding
GRIN’s development is volunteer-based and relies on a community funding model that is similar to the one utilized by the Monero project, donations being the only external source of funding of the project, whilst BEAM is VC funded and funnels
a portion of the block reward of the network into a Foundation to support the blockchain’s development.

b. Governance
GRIN is an open-source community-driven decentralized implementation of the Mimblewimble protocol whilst BEAM maintains a corporate structure.

c. Target Customer
GRIN only offers a command-line wallet, which is not very accessible for non-technical users and “it’s still very much aimed at a technical crowd.” so that is their audience for now.
BEAM, by contrast, puts a heavy emphasis on usability having built a simple wallet interface that is considered central to the project’s overall value-add so their target audience is the broad user.

d. Emission Schedules
GRIN’s monetary policy is unfixed but the network currently emits one new token per second whilst BEAM sees itself as a “store of value” coin that has a fixed issuance schedule akin to bitcoin.

2. What is the key privacy concern of both, and what feature do they implement to deal with this?
Both GRIN and BEAM implementations of the Mimblewimble protocol have concerns that may potentially be vulnerable to machine-learning analysis - due to the design’s failure to conceal inputs and outputs.
In order to deal with this both implementations implement the privacy feature Dandelion to better conceal those potential leaks.

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#126

1.) Describing the difference between GRIN’s and BEAM’s:
a. Funding: GRIN’s funding maintains a decentralized nature with no token premines or ICO, and has a volunteer-based development. BEAM, on the other hand, has sought Venture Capital funding and hired a full-time team of developers to work on its software.
b. Governance: The governance of GRIN is carried out by a community forum, similar to that of the Monero project. In contrast, BEAM is governed in a more corporate structure. The block reward’s of BEAM’s miners are partially sent to a central foundation to support the blockchain’s development.
c. Target Customer: BEAM has a target customer who’s emphasis relies on usability and utility, and is accessible on several softwares, including: MacOS, Windows, and Linux. GRIN, however, only offers a command-line wallet and isn’t as accessible as BEAM (especially for non-technical users).
d. Emission Schedules: Similar to that of Bitcoin, BEAM has a hard cap supply on the amount of coins that can be mined; in addition, BEAM’s founders saw their coin as a “confidential store of value” (emission is limited). In spite of BEAM, GRIN has a monetary policy that is unfixed and new coins are issued every second. The project’s belief is that a sustained issuance will only stabilize the value of the currency, not increase it over time.
2.) The key privacy concern of both GRIN and BEAM is the potential vulnerability to machine-learning analysis. Both of them have implemented the Dandelion privacy feature to better secure leaks in inputs and outputs of transactions on their protocols.

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#127

:one: Describe the difference between GRIN’s and BEAM’s…

  1. Funding
    Grin’s funding is entirely comprised of community donations.
    Beam is funded most by VC firms.

  2. Governance
    The Grin protocol is governed in a decentralized way, by volunteers and community members.
    Beam has made the trade-off to make governance more centralized in order to make better progress faster.

  3. Target Customer
    Grin’s target customer is generally a purist and tech-savvy. With a CLI as the platform, many people won’t know how to interact with Grin. Given the focus on privacy, more than price - this may repel a large amount of the crypto community.
    Beam is more focused on providing a product to the masses, which also takes interest in being a store of value - meaning they are interested in having sound tokenomics. Their product will also be much more user-friendly than Grins.

  4. Emission Schedules
    Grin issues a token every second, whereas
    Beam has a capped supply with a fixed issuance schedule - similar to Bitcoin.

:two: What is the key privacy concern of both, and what feature do they implement to deal with this?

The primary privacy concern is the evolution of machine-learning analysis.
They don’t conceal inputs and outputs.
To deal with this, they implemented Dandelion, a protocol which was also used by Monero at the time of the article.

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#128
  1. Describe the difference between GRIN’s and BEAM’s…? :
  • Funding :
    GRIN : Donations
    BEAM : Startup Company funding.
  • Governance :
    GRIN : Donations
    BEAM : Startup Company funding
  • Target Customer :
    GRIN : Target Customer : Technical Crowd
    BEAM : Target Customer : Non-Technical People
  • Emission Schedules :
    GRIN : 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
    BEAM : Fixed issuance schedule akin to Bitcoin
  1. What is the key privacy concern of both, and what feature do they implement to deal with this? : Both are vulnerable to machine-learning analysis based on design’s failure to conceal inputs and outputs so, they implement Dandelion to better conceal these potential leak.
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#129
  1. Funding: GRIN was developed as an open-source, community-driven project and was funded through donations and grants. BEAM, on the other hand, conducted an initial coin offering (ICO) to raise funds for development.

Governance: GRIN is governed by a decentralized community of developers and users, while BEAM has a more centralized governance structure with a board of directors and a team of advisors.

Target Customer: Both GRIN and BEAM are targeted at users who value privacy and want to transact anonymously. However, GRIN has a more general focus and is not specifically designed for any particular use case, while BEAM is focused on enterprise use cases and aims to offer additional features and tools for businesses.

Emission Schedules: Both GRIN and BEAM have limited, fixed supplies of coins, with GRIN having a maximum supply of 262.8 million coins and BEAM having a maximum supply of 263.8 million coins. However, their emission schedules differ: GRIN has a gradually decreasing block reward schedule, while BEAM has a more complex schedule that includes both block rewards and a “tail emission” of coins that will be released over a longer period of time.

  1. Privacy Concern: Both GRIN and BEAM aim to provide strong privacy protections by using the Mimblewimble protocol, which allows for transactions to be aggregated and made confidential.

However, a key privacy concern with both coins is the possibility of “chain analysis” attacks, where an attacker could potentially track the flow of coins through the blockchain and infer information about the parties involved in a transaction. To address this concern, both GRIN and BEAM have implemented various techniques to obscure the flow of coins on the blockchain, including CoinJoin transactions and stealth addresses.

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#130

  1. Describe the difference between GRIN’s and BEAM’s…

  2. Funding: GRIN (Donations only). BEAM: (Venture Capital Funding)

  3. Governance: GRIN: (Not driven by profits or corporate interest, community driven). BEAM: (Corporate structure)

  4. Target Customer: GRIN: (Technical users) BEAM: (Simple user interface targeting the less tech savy)

  5. Emission Schedules: GRIN: (tokens issued every second). BEAM: (Fixed issuance schedule).

  6. What is the key privacy concern of both, and what feature do they implement to deal with this?
    Both implementations maybe vulnerable to machine-learning analysis – due to the design’s failure to conceal inputs and outputs. Both teams currently implement a privacy feature named Dandelion to better conceal these potential leaks.