How to mine the popular privacy concept token Grin at home at zero cost!

The market is so cold now, why do we still need to mine?

Although the crypto market has cooled down recently, it still cannot stop a large number of investment institutions and research institutions from showing interest in the new generation privacy coin Grin. According to the Predictions website, Grin's market value will exceed $500 million six months after its launch, and the value of one token will reach $32 . This set of numbers alone has made Grin stand out from a bunch of recent projects.

Recommending a coin that is not listed on an exchange to readers, are you BlockBeats scamming people?

BlockBeats will not endorse any project, but we are willing to share excellent project ideas with readers . What exactly is Grin? Why are investment tycoons so optimistic about Grin? BlockBeats will show you what Grin is and how to mine Grin with your own computer.

How did Grin become so popular?

Note: When you read this article, the Grin coin has not yet appeared and no one has mined it yet, as its mainnet will not be launched until 2019.

When talking about Grin, we must first mention its underlying protocol MimbleWimble. MimbleWimble comes from a spell in "Harry Potter", the purpose of which is to make the cursed person unable to speak.

MimbleWimble embodies a key principle in the design of transaction structure, namely strong privacy and confidentiality. MimbleWimble transaction confirmation relies on two basic properties: the first is zero-sum verification, that is, the sum of outputs minus the sum of inputs is always equal to zero, proving that the transaction did not create new funds out of thin air and will not display the actual amount; the second is that the ownership of the transaction output is owned by the private key. In MimbleWimble, proving that an owner owns these private keys is not achieved directly by signing the transaction.

Grin is an open source software project based on the MimbleWimble protocol, with the following main purposes and features:

1. Privacy-preserving default features . This makes it fully fungible while retaining the ability to selectively disclose information on demand.

2. The block size is adapted to the transaction volume . Historical transactions only retain about 100 bytes of transaction core, which saves a lot of space compared to other blockchains.

3. Strong and proven cryptography . MimbleWimble uses only elliptic curve cryptography, which has been tried and tested for decades.

4. Simple design makes future code review and maintenance easy.

5. Community-driven . Adopt an ASIC-resistant mining algorithm (Cuckoo Cycle algorithm) to encourage decentralized mining.

6. The community is not controlled or invested by any organization or individual, and the development team only accepts donations.

BlockBeats believes that Grin is so popular mainly due to the following three reasons:

No pre-mining, everyone starts from the same starting line

Grin's current mining design uses the Cuckaroo Cycle algorithm, but the specific details of the Grin algorithm are still relatively vague. The new algorithm mainly improves its previous anti-ASIC algorithm, from the previous completely anti-ASIC improvement to the algorithm gradually transitioning to ASIC-friendly.

That is, in two years, the initial 90% GPU + 10% ASIC will gradually transition to 100% ASIC. This will ensure that the computing power will not be over-concentrated, and more minicomputers or PCs can participate in mining in the initial stage.

The concentration of computing power in mining machines is an inevitable problem for any POW algorithm blockchain, but it is worth mentioning that in Grin’s original mining design, the team intended to adopt the Cuckoo Cycle algorithm, which is completely ASIC-resistant.

The team has been trying to maintain the anti-ASIC feature by adjusting the algorithm parameters every 6 months, hoping to achieve truly decentralized mining. However, this approach still cannot achieve complete anti-ASIC, because it cannot prevent some companies from secretly researching ASIC.

Once these companies successfully develop ASIC chips, it will bring more unfairness to the entire mining network, because their chips are more efficient and can crush graphics card mining. However, the algorithm adjustment every 6 months will interfere with the pace of research and development, and ordinary miners will get less benefits.

No investment, only donations

(List of donors on Grin’s official website)

It should be noted that none of the individuals or institutions mentioned above invested in the Grin project, but donated to the development team. Looking at Grin's donation institutions, we found many familiar figures, including Continue Capital , KR1 and Cypher Capital, all of which donated to Grin.

Looking at Grin's donations, we also found many founders and core team members of blockchain startups, including the CEO of Beam, a project also developed based on the MimbleWimble protocol, and the vice president of the public chain project Orbs. In addition, a well-known American VC organization also donated money to the Grin team, just to get the opportunity to obtain the contact information of the Grin core team.

Are there any benefits for donating money to the Grin team? Can I get Grin tokens? Can I get equity in the Grin team?

No... these donors do not receive any benefits or receipts, the most they get is a thank you from the development team on Twitter.

The members of the Grin core team are also very good at hiding their identities in the online world. The institutions and individuals who donated to Grin can only communicate with the core team online, and the offline meetups are also spontaneously organized by the Grin community. It is a bit like the early days of Bitcoin when everyone only communicated in forums. The more you know, the easier it is to get involved in conflicts of interest.

But there may be some risks, such as the algorithm has been disclosed to some investment institutions, and the investment institutions have begun to produce mining machines, etc. However, this speculation seems to be self-defeating in the content mentioned below.

The Grin team is really poor, so poor that they can only do things...

Grin has a very amazing core team. Unlike some POW projects, they do not pre-mine for various reasons, do not provide equity or tokens of the Grin project in exchange for financing, and only rely on community donations to ensure the operation of the project and pay the team's salaries and project operating expenses.

So far, Grin has launched 4 fundraising requests, including 3 rounds of funding campaigns for project development and 1 round of personal developer funds raised by Michael Cordner. The project is also raising a security audit fund to pay for the project's security audit fees. The goal is to raise 16 BTC, and 10.1 BTC has been raised so far, supporting BTC and ZEC fundraising.

Friends, what does 16 BTC mean? Ordinary blockchain project financing can generally get ETH or BTC equivalent to 10-30 million US dollars, while 16 TCs are only a pitiful 50,000 US dollars.

Looking at the Grin project forum, we also found that in addition to the core team, technical personnel from big companies continue to join the Grin community to do technical development for the Grin project, such as technical personnel from Coinbase.

Grin's mainnet will be launched on January 15, 2019, when Grin coins will be officially mined. So far, Grin's downstream infrastructure has been basically built by community members, such as exchanges, wallets, and mining pools, waiting for the launch of Grin's mainnet.

How to mine?

Since Grin is still in the testnet stage and the mainnet is not yet online, there is no income for the mined Grin for the time being. However, the entire mining process of the testnet is basically the same as the mining process after the mainnet is launched, so you can experience it in advance. The mining efficiency is 1 minute to mine a block, and the reward for one block is 60 Grin.

Grin supports miners to conduct CPU and GPU mining, and members of the Grin community have also established mining pools to lower the threshold for mining. CPU and GPU mining currently only supports Linux systems and Windows systems with built-in hyper-v, and the mining pools established by community members also only support Linux and Windows systems.

Regarding GPU and CPU mining, someone on the Grin forum has posted a very detailed mining tutorial, link: How to Mine Cuckoo 30 in Grin: Help us test and collect stats!

Grin's CPU mining is mainly divided into the following steps:

First, build Grin on your computer . Detailed instructions are available on Github at mimblewimble/grin

There is one thing to note here, because we are going to mine Grin on Testnet 2 using the Cuckoo 30 algorithm, so make sure we choose the correct branch:

Also make sure that the default settings in grin.html are selected for the mining server running for testnet 2.

Then, build grin-miner on your computer. Download link: https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin-miner, and make sure the previously built Grin node and the currently built grin-miner are on the same machine.

Next, you can start CPU mining.

When you see the above code, it means you can start mining Grin, but the current mining speed is still very slow. You can increase the mining speed by changing the plugin or changing the number of physical cores according to the performance of your computer. This requires a process of constantly adjusting parameters and observing iterative results, because the performance of each person's device is different. After multiple adjustments, you can basically reach a good mining speed to mine Grin.

If you have a headache with the text version of the tutorial, you can also check out the 30-minute mining video tutorial released by the Grin community master. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-kF9RnkeJo

In addition to tutorials on CPU and GPU mining, BlockBeats has also thoughtfully prepared a link to the Grin mining pool for everyone, which has a much lower threshold than the former.

MWGrinPool mining pool supports use in Europe, Asia, North America and other regions. It supports both CPU and GPU mining, with 0 handling fees. Official website link: https://www.mwgrinpool.com/pool

Currently, MWGrinPool mining pool has also released CPU and GPU mining tutorials. The CPU mining tutorial link is: https://medium.com/@blade.doyle/cpu-mining-on-mwgrinpool-com-how-to-efb9ed102bc9 , and the GPU mining tutorial link is: https://medium.com/@blade.doyle/gpu-mining-on-mwgrinpool-com-how-to-72970e550a27.

Since Grin is still in the testnet stage, there are only three active miners.

The specific mining operation is quite detailed, and different people may encounter different problems. In the Grin community, we also found that some Grin enthusiasts will encounter the problem that mining is always stuck at a block height. If you encounter any problems in actual mining, you are welcome to join our Grin Chinese community to discuss.

At present, it is possible to mine using a computer CPU, but the speed is a bit slower. If you want to mine faster, you need a graphics card with at least 8GB of video memory, that is, a graphics card of GTX 1070 or above .

Although the blockchain has not yet been launched, the entire community is ready to go. Both mining and mining pools are ready, and many investment institutions have quietly begun to lay out Grin. Can the Grin project be successful? We don't know yet, but we will know the result when Grin goes online.