To many readers, even those with a working knowledge of cryptocurrency, the working model of the Grin coin, the (at least in part) brainchild of core developer Quentin Le Sceller, seems a little bit like mumbo-jumbo:
“Grin is a privacy coin that implements scalability- and privacy-focused Mimblewimble protocol — named after a fictional tongue-tying curse from the popular Harry Potter novels,” writes Marie Huillet at Cointelegraph today. “Mimblewimble is in part a variant of the cryptographic protocol known as Confidential Transactions, which allows for transactions to be obfuscated yet verifiable so as to achieve both heightened privacy and the prevention of double spending.”
As Grin gets set up for its first hard fork, it’s notable to look at what that split in the coin’s central community infrastructure represents.
Huillet reveals that the hard fork is going to create a specific new algorithm shift process that is aimed at warding off minors using specialized hardware.
This gets right down into the details of how cryptocurrency mining generally works.
Minors have embraced GPUs or graphic processing units as an innovation over the traditional CPU. These processors, which have parallel computing capacity, have been extremely useful in doing all of the data-intensive work involved in mining a cryptocurrency.
However, something even faster came along – the ASIC or application-specific integrated circuit chip.
Although the technology is abundantly complex, in a nutshell, the ASIC uses a specific algorithm approach to mine. It’s specialized hardware – it’s set up for a specific purpose and so, in many apples to apples comparisons, an ASIC can outperform a GPU for that very specific task.
It seems though that some cryptocurrency buffs want to limit the power of ASIC miners to dominate. That’s what’s at the heart of Grin’s efforts to create algorithm changes that are going to make the mining algorithm process more dynamic, and limit the effectiveness of ASICs in mining.
Huillet reports the hard forks will also increase wallet flexibility.
This is a good read for anyone interested in cryptocurrency. We’ve heard a lot about the financial landscape, but knowing how miners work and how cryptocurrencies react to changes in the mining community is kind of an advanced cryptocurrency primer – one that will allow the most well-read investors to obtain more thought authority in this space.
