You’ve likely heard the buzz about Mina from your favorite podcast hosts. You have to credit the Mina Protocol organization’s marketing crew for targeting noob rubes like me. Usually, I heavily doubt anything I hear in ads, especially if the product sounds too good to be true. Then Mina was featured on Anna Rose’s Zero Knowledge podcast and I was intrigued. Mina CRACKED into the top 100 after chilling on Page 2 for the first year of its launch (and a rebranding from Coda).
Two cool things about Mina.
- They use zkSnarks which is “spooky math” to verify a value without knowing the value. This is kinda like 20 questions. When trying to guess my shoe size, for example, you can guess low and know my actual shoe size is higher. A use case for this is to ask if my bank balance is above $1000. If it is, you know I can probably afford $1001. zkSnarks mean that a lot of secrets are kept secrets. This leads to the other cool thing.
- With the secrets come succinctness. Instead of my bank account balance and shoe size floating around on chain, they can be reduced to “Shoesize>9” and “bankbalance >$1000”. Okay that particular example falls flat here, but just imagine an entire hash represented by a few bytes. This is what causes the Mina blocksize to be tiny, and that enables it to run fast and economical.
So such a young project, they can’t have had anyone interested in building on the platform, ey? Wrong. They call their Mina-enabled dApps called “Snapps”.
Teller is a Snapp that allows users to verify their credit score is above a certain threshold without disclosing the exact numeric value of the score. Another project enables on-chain oracles to run without exposing the underlying info. I do not have a clever analogy for this. This opens the possibilities of oracles for yourself. Think of having your own data kept private, such as passwords, bank balances and even private keys while still letting someone else know that you have them. Yet another Snap enables you to have an email address… [yawn] that no one knows what it is [puts down drink and leans forward]. Right now my head (and yours) is spinning around the possibilities of an online life without F/oogle reading your email or snooping in your purchase history- because all of these things can be rolled up in zkSnarks. And they have smart contracts on the way [teeth grinding] called Pickles, (FFS!)
Expensive? Probably. Mina has rarely been below a dollar and is hanging out at a nickel bag. I’d like to test out one of these Snapps. I could trade for Mina in a dEX(my only viable option right now), then, I don’t know, put some information on chain that F/oogle hasn’t already hoovered up, then use my OSINT skills to get to my own ZKSnark protected data. But that is something for when I have 10k subs on Medium and my own sponsored podcast. This is a low rent blog here, folks.
Self-deprecation and strategic laziness aside, buying the token and verifying the psychological value of Mina is difficult. Mina’s marketing budget, robust social presence (including 60k Telegram users!) and simple “smaller is better” message have propelled it to CRACK into the low 90s since I mentioned it a week ago. They have an impressive range of translations of their marketing material.
You can run a node to become a Block Producer, which is kinda a miner but with PoS, or a Snark Producer.
Nodes are super lightweight so running a node does not require heavy-duty hardware, but I wonder if the heavy-hardware guys have an advantage?
I've got a lot of questions about this project. Because I suck at "spooky math" and "basic math" and "counting" I may never fully understand the objective truth behind Mina. I'm suspicious, but look, there is a reason for a big ICO fundraiser is to develop hard and fast and put out a lot of marketing and translations. DYOR, because I'm not the lad for this task.
But I did entertain you to the end, huh? Let me entertain you more every week, by subscribing to this and my exploration of DAOs. No moon. No Lambo. Lotsa funny.
