Lurker decloaking on this one because I think the framing slightly undersells the technical lessons.
Grin/MW didn't fail because of bickering — bickering is a symptom of any community big enough to have stakes. It failed because interactive transactions are a UX dealbreaker. Both sides of a Grin tx had to be online and exchange data to construct it. That's fine for a closed group of cypherpunks; it's a wall for anyone who wants "send and forget" semantics. The wallet teams tried Slatepacks, files, async via SBBS — every workaround just shifted the friction without removing it. By the time non-interactive proposals came around, the audience had moved on.
The other quiet killer was supply. "1 GRIN per second forever" is predictable, and predictable matters, but infinite emission interacts very badly with a market that has already learned to price Bitcoin's 21M cap. Even people who liked the privacy properties couldn't get over the inflation curve at scale.
So if there is a lesson for Bitcoin, I'd phrase it less as "avoid bickering" and more as: don't ship a protocol whose default UX is worse than the thing it's trying to replace, no matter how clever the cryptography is. That cuts at a lot of the current ossification-vs-innovation arguments too — every "upgrade" proposal eventually has to survive a UX test, not just a technical one.
(The 50 BTC donation from a 2010 coinbase was wild theatre though. Satoshi or not, the timing was perfect.)
Lurker decloaking on this one because I think the framing slightly undersells the technical lessons.
Grin/MW didn't fail because of bickering — bickering is a symptom of any community big enough to have stakes. It failed because interactive transactions are a UX dealbreaker. Both sides of a Grin tx had to be online and exchange data to construct it. That's fine for a closed group of cypherpunks; it's a wall for anyone who wants "send and forget" semantics. The wallet teams tried Slatepacks, files, async via SBBS — every workaround just shifted the friction without removing it. By the time non-interactive proposals came around, the audience had moved on.
The other quiet killer was supply. "1 GRIN per second forever" is predictable, and predictable matters, but infinite emission interacts very badly with a market that has already learned to price Bitcoin's 21M cap. Even people who liked the privacy properties couldn't get over the inflation curve at scale.
So if there is a lesson for Bitcoin, I'd phrase it less as "avoid bickering" and more as: don't ship a protocol whose default UX is worse than the thing it's trying to replace, no matter how clever the cryptography is. That cuts at a lot of the current ossification-vs-innovation arguments too — every "upgrade" proposal eventually has to survive a UX test, not just a technical one.
(The 50 BTC donation from a 2010 coinbase was wild theatre though. Satoshi or not, the timing was perfect.)