mimblewimble team mailing list archive

[Ignotus Peverell <igno.peverell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

We're getting closer and closer to a testnet [1] and it may be a good idea to start thinking of outward communication. We want to have enough time to prepare so when the time comes, we don't get confused with the thousands of other projects in this noisy space, and have a chance to voice our strengths and differences. Messaging can also take time to refine. Now, as I know words like "narratives" (yeastplume used it first, not me :P) can make some developers' eyes glaze over, I'll start with something more fun and friendly: naming [2].

We need names for a few things:

- Our blockchain type. I'm happy to keep using MimbleWimble here. I know that technically, the Grin blockchain will have quite a bit more than just what's in the Jedusor white paper, but I think at a high level it's a good approximation. Some people are also already familiar with it and heard the name.
- Our implementation. I'm not unhappy with grin but I'm not opposed to renaming if too many folks are strongly against it.
- Our coin. We have nothing so far here so we need to find a name. My first inclination would be to accept propositions for names as replies to this email, and then run a poll online. Sounds good as a process? We likely need another name for smallest denominations too.

To draw a parallel, in the Ethereum world 1) is Ethereum, 2) is Parity or geth, 3) is Ether/Wei.

Now for the messaging and narratives. In my experience (which is a lot more shallow in that domain), we want to outline our strengths and differences to formulate a value proposition. From there we can distill messages of various lengths, adapted to different support (one-liner title, one paragraph article intro, full website, etc). And ideally, we'd have opportunities to try these messages in various environments to see how they work and incrementally improve them.

So I'll start with a mixed bag of strengths and differences in no particular order and maybe we can figure out a way to go from there. If some people have more experience in how to go about this and a good process to get there, by all means please chime in.

- Strong anonymity provided by obfuscating amounts, sources and destinations and removing data over time.
- Great scalability as most blockchain data gets removed, without compromising security (the magic part).
- A diverse community of developers and cryptographers (no control from a single entity).
- A brand new, clean (relatively) and modern blockchain implementation with few fundamental primitives.
- A Harry Potter theme that, while quirky, has personality (obviously, I may be biased).
- No ICO, pre-mine or funny business. We may still need to find a way to get funding but hopefully it'll be reasonable and in line with other funded open source projects/foundations.
- The person who started the project has a cool name and uses parentheses a little too much (it's a side effect of the cloak).

For others involved in this project, I'd love to hear what it means to you as well.

- Igno

[1] I know it's taking some time but I decided to include the UTXO sum tree in that milestone, which created a bit more work than I expected.
[2] Throwing a Wikipedia article your way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name#In_cryptography