I agree grin is more philosophically pure, and that the beam approach is more effective. Neither is a scam. I’m pretty familiar with the challenges in the nonprofit foundation/decentralized model.
I don’t think the monetary/inflation model sufficiently differs between the two to make a real difference. For a payments system, I’d rather see higher inflation, or at least a subsidiary token with higher information, but none vs linear isn’t a big difference, and any of these can probably work, as long as it is predictable.
As long as they are making decent decisions, no one deeply cares about governance (yet). Maybe they will in the future, but for going from
0 to something used by people, I don’t think it has ever been a top concern.
One of the two will probably win, but that will likely be determined by:
1) merchant/user/developer adoption (which all feeds on itself, and has a bunch of factors — marketing, toolchain, etc
2) exchange support, with three tiers — “any exchange”, a “big exchange”, and (depending on the user) “my preferred exchange” (coinbase or binance for many)
3) lack of fucking up in unrecoverable ways
4) (as yet unsubstantiated) the first really good mobile wallets on android and iOS
5) killer initial applications (which might just be regular user to user anonymous payments, but could be something new)
6) maybe: erc-20 type functionality to support other kinds of assets
The other competitor for both is if an existing base layer adopts MW. If BTC or ETH (or maybe XTZ or EOS or something) adopted it overnight, that would probably remove the market for a new MW token.