I would like to have a comparison between the privacy and scalability features of Monero vs Grin. I have heard some people say that these are privacy-oriented coins, and I would like to learn more. What are the meaningful privacy and scaling differences?
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Monero is using ring signatures=mixer. You can link them. Grin has no adresses and no amounts. Monero linking and Grin MW tx graph linkage is quite different. You cant have privacy without scaling. Lastly Monero increased ring singatures size to 16. So it wasnt enough before? What is next ? increase ring signatures to 40 and make the blockchain 100 times heavier than Bitcoin ?– majorplayerAug 20, 2022 at 10:43
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1 Answer
Pardon the image, but there is no way to create tables in StackExchange.
Grin's privacy is best characterized as "Monero with aggressive pruning and no ring signatures." Users who are unable to get access to old information cannot pull up past transaction information by looking at the current ledger state. However, those who receive transactions as they are broadcast can see the inputs and outputs for individual transactions. This effectively indicates whether outputs are spent, something that is not possible with Monero. Grin uses "confidential transactions," a technology that hides transaction amounts, nothing else. The output transaction graph is hidden through obscurity of information, not anything committed on-chain.
Monero's scalability has improved significantly over recent years. Transaction sizes fell from ~13 kB to ~1.5kB. Monero now supports pruning, allowing users to ignore most of the information for old transactions. Still, Grin allows more information to be pruned, and they prune it much faster.
I did not include network privacy on this chart, since both Monero and Grin provide network privacy. Monero provides support for Tor and i2p, and it later will provide support for Dandelion++. Grin supports Dandelion++, and users can use Tor or i2p if they configure it manually. Transaction network obfuscation is important, but it's less important for most people than graph protection.
I like to think of Monero and Grin as projects that are pushing the privacy and scalability boundaries, each beginning in different positions. Monero is focused on a privacy angle with scalability second, whereas Grin has the opposite focus.
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Great answer! Can you explain what the large difference in pruned transaction size between the two is caused by?– runeksNov 21, 2019 at 18:39
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1@runeks with Monero, the entire TXO set needs to be kept since we don't know which are spent (due to the protections of ring signatures). With Grin, we can eliminate the TXOs that are known spent.– sgpDec 3, 2019 at 16:01
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The picture is misleading, in that Grin is about 2/3 as private, and 17x more scalable. Feb 4, 2020 at 17:16