Agenda: Governance, Aug 11 2020

[lehnberg]

Solicit suggestions for agenda items for the Governance meeting to be held on Tuesday Aug 11 @ 15:00 UTC in Keybase main lobby. Please comment to provide topics or suggestions.

Proposed agenda

1. Agenda review
2. Action point follow ups from previous meeting
   • Paouky funding processed?
   • Spending logs updated?
3. Grin & ASICs: AMA with Thomas and Kevin from Vidtoo & Canaan
4. Documentation progress
5. Code of conduct progress
6. RFC & sub-teams update
7. Other questions

[garyyu]

Currently the AR(ASIC Resistant) PoW has come to 20% ratio, and will gradually decrease to 0% at that day (about 5 months later), then Grin will completely be AT(ASIC Target) PoW. This is the sticky plan in Grin, eventually Grin will be 100% ASIC friendly.

Since the very beginning of Grin mainnet launching, some news of Grin ASIC miner come from time to time, we can find one summary here(https://forum.grin.mw/t/grin-asic-miner-summary-and-roi-estimation/4913) in forum. But time proves that most of them didn't become a real product, cancelled for this or that reason, including Obelisk and Innosilicon 's miner.

Concerning the last one I knew for Grin ASIC miner, I contact with Thomas of Vidtoo Inc. and it seems that things are in good progress there. So, after a discussion with some community members and Thomas, I feel it will be better to invite them to join this governance meeting, then any concerns and questions can be asked to them directly.

So, could you please add one agenda item about this? thanks, prefer it as the 1st topic in the meeting because of the timezone reason, time will be very late for Thomas and his colleagues.

At this time, Thomas Hu and Kevin Shao have confirmed to join this online governance meeting.
btw, Thomas is GM of Vidtoo Inc., Kevin Shao is the GM of blockchain business group of Canaan Inc. Vidtoo could be a wholly-owned subsidiary of Canaan.

Regarding the questions to them, not limited but at least I saw some from the forum or group chat:

1. There's no evidence of ASIC mining on Grin yet, no bump in graphrate, so we wonder what became of these G1 miners. And some people reported that the original news of G1 miner in WeChat had been deleted.
2. Who is behind G1 miner?
3. Will the asic and/or miner be on a public sale and whether there is an estimated price already? And will it be available for sale to the north american public?
4. Anything about production numbers?

[lehnberg]

@garyyu good to see you here, thanks for this suggestion, sounds interesting! :)

If it helps, we could set up a dedicated meeting with Thomas and Kevin in a slot that suits their time zone a bit better?

Maybe also announce that on the forum and take "AMA style" questions from the forum as well?

What do you think?

[garyyu]

@lehnberg thanks for the advice, It's OK to join at normal governance meeting time, since most of community members already tuned on that for a very long time:-) just please help to put that as the 1st agenda item so as to them can be released before the midnight, thanks Daniel.

[lehnberg]

Done, looking forward! 👍

[garyyu]

@lehnberg I just got a message from Kevin to request to correct his current profile: Kevin Shao is now the Bitrise Capital Partner. Please use this new profile for him in all later related news. Thanks~

[lehnberg]

Keeping a list of questions we have gathered ahead of the meeting here:

1. Who is behind, who's financing the production of the G1 miner?
2. What are the technical specs?
   • Does each chip have roughly 64 GB of on-chip SRAM for node bitmaps?
   • Does it have 512 MB of external RAM (HBM(2) ?!) for the edge bitmap?
   • Is it using an 8x TMTO lean solver?
   • What's the graphrate and power consumption?
   • What configurations will be available?
   • Which algorithm(s) is/are the miner compatible with?
3. There's been no evidence of ASIC mining on Grin yet, no bump in graphrate. Will you be mining Grin before selling?
4. The original news of G1 miner on WeChat have since been deleted. How come?
5. Will the miner be sold to the public, if so when?
6. What will the delivery time be?
7. Is there a price or price range set?
8. In which markets will it be available? Will it be available for sale to the North American public?
9. What is the country of origin of the manufacturer? Will US customers have to pay 27.6% tarrifs?
10. What type of payment will be accepted?
11. What are the production numbers?
12. What is the production capacity and the expected scale of the mining machine market by the end of the year
13. What's the status of the second generation? What kind of performance increase is expected? Are they built in 7nm?
14. Will eventual 5nm process bring order of magnitude increase in performance or the typical 15-30% that a node shrink would suggest?
15. How will you ensure these miners ends up in the hands of "we the people" vs large farms?