Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
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Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#2I actually emailed someone at BOINC in July 2015 regarding exactly this, I see the paper came out in December 2015 with the idea. Glad to see it finally becoming a reality.
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#3I actually emailed someone at BOINC in July 2015 regarding exactly this, I see the paper came out in December 2015 with the idea. Glad to see it finally becoming a reality.
Gridcoin was launched on October 16, 2013 https://gridcoin.us/wiki/
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#4I tried out Gridcoin a few years back in it's $0.05 days, its at ~$0.01 now - at the time you had to "buy in" about $100 USD to have enough collateral to work solo (stake to get credit rewards), otherwise you had to join a mining pool to just get paid your meager credits. A basic $5 cloud server cannot generate enough GRC credit to pay for itself at 5 cents.
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#5I've been trying to bring attention to this project for years. It directly addresses the whole "proof of work is proof of waste" problem. Some of my earliest submissions to HN were about GridCoin, and they largely went compeletely ignored, glad to finally see it on the front page. At least with BOINC you end up with something more worthwhile than just bruteforcing hashes.
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#6I've been trying to bring attention to this project for years. It directly addresses the whole "proof of work is proof of waste" problem. Some of my earliest submissions to HN were about GridCoin, and they largely went compeletely ignored, glad to finally see it on the front page. At least with BOINC you end up with something more worthwhile than just bruteforcing hashes.
Same, I even bought some back in... 2014 I think?
I'm yet ambivalent on if it's a factor on why it hasn't been able to attract serious attention, but I've heard the argument that doing calculations that have external value outside of PoW breaks the incentive mechanisms.
To me, merge mining on Bitcoin[0] and MEV on Ethereum[1] are evidence against that argument, since we already have those forces in play today. So Gridcoins concept should work.
[0]: https://blog.bitmex.com/the-growth-of-bitcoin-merge-mining/
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#7How is it verified? I thought the problem with doing useful work instead of normal PoW was that producing and verifying are equally hard, while Bitcoin's PoW scheme is hard to produce but easy to verify (so other miners can easily see that you've actually found the hash without doing any computations themselves).
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#8How can regulations can make alternative, less climate-harming projects such as this more attractive over bitcoin? Would crypto-currency income taxes or perhaps data center laws (similar to cyber-crime laws) be a useful tool? Or would that only favor lightning networks/PoS and those not declaring earnings.
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#9How can regulations can make alternative, less climate-harming projects such as this more attractive over bitcoin? Would crypto-currency income taxes or perhaps data center laws (similar to cyber-crime laws) be a useful tool? Or would that only favor lightning networks/PoS and those not declaring earnings.
Your aim is off, bitcoin using energy is fine just like any other use of energy is fine, part of the free market of ebergy. It’s production of energy from fossil fuels that isn’t fine.
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#10I tried out Gridcoin a few years back in it's $0.05 days, its at ~$0.01 now - at the time you had to "buy in" about $100 USD to have enough collateral to work solo (stake to get credit rewards), otherwise you had to join a mining pool to just get paid your meager credits. A basic $5 cloud server cannot generate enough GRC credit to pay for itself at 5 cents.
>A basic $5 cloud server cannot generate enough GRC credit to pay for itself at 5 cents.
This is totally expected because of how the economics of mining works. If it were profitable to mine with a $5 cloud server then everybody would jump on, difficulty would increase, and it wouldn't be profitable anymore. The miners you're competing against are hobbyists with much cheaper access to compute than you, eg. they've already bought a threadripper workstation for work related purposes and they're just using the spare cycles.