[jarodym]

Grin, academics and early bitcoiners second attempt at digital cash.

Community funded. Pure mine. Rust, inflationary economics, cuckoo cycles. No governance, but that is debatable. Small team making decisions. What is that?

Beam, entrepreneur team. Had a presalethat allowed them to put devs on the project full time and blow past Grin in material output. It’s not a “pre-sale” but it is. They pay back the investors through splitting the block reward (founder’s reward) over the first five years. Then spin that into a foundation, C++, cuckoo cycles.

Give Beam a chance before you say it’s a scam. They are good people. I don’t agree with what people are saying about them, despite disagreeing with their approach. Talk to them before making up your mind. They have sound arguments that founder’s will understand, and ideologues like me disagree with.

[xkarga00]

> Community funded. Pure mine. Rust, inflationary economics, cuckoo cycles. No governance, but that is debatable. Small team making decisions. What is that?

Somebody has to do the work to bootstrap and develop the network. Whom do you expect to govern the project? Governance meetings are public, bi-weekly, in the Gitter Lobby chat, you are free to join.

Also since I am into nitpicking, economics are inflationary for the first couple of decades gradually switching to deflationary (1 grin per second forever).

[rdl]

I agree grin is more philosophically pure, and that the beam approach is more effective. Neither is a scam. I’m pretty familiar with the challenges in the nonprofit foundation/decentralized model.

I don’t think the monetary/inflation model sufficiently differs between the two to make a real difference. For a payments system, I’d rather see higher inflation, or at least a subsidiary token with higher information, but none vs linear isn’t a big difference, and any of these can probably work, as long as it is predictable.

As long as they are making decent decisions, no one deeply cares about governance (yet). Maybe they will in the future, but for going from 0 to something used by people, I don’t think it has ever been a top concern.

One of the two will probably win, but that will likely be determined by:

1) merchant/user/developer adoption (which all feeds on itself, and has a bunch of factors — marketing, toolchain, etc

2) exchange support, with three tiers — “any exchange”, a “big exchange”, and (depending on the user) “my preferred exchange” (coinbase or binance for many)

3) lack of fucking up in unrecoverable ways

4) (as yet unsubstantiated) the first really good mobile wallets on android and iOS

5) killer initial applications (which might just be regular user to user anonymous payments, but could be something new)

6) maybe: erc-20 type functionality to support other kinds of assets

The other competitor for both is if an existing base layer adopts MW. If BTC or ETH (or maybe XTZ or EOS or something) adopted it overnight, that would probably remove the market for a new MW token.

[tromp]

While Grin uses Cuckoo Cycle (to be precise, one variant aimed at ASICs and another aimed at GPUs, in a dual-PoW setup), Beam uses an Equihash variant for Proof-of-Work.