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Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing

gridcoin.us

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Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing

#11

Post by hakesdev »

Forbo wrote: post #5

I'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.

If you use a money with an issuance scheme that doesn't derive from pure costs (useless things like hashing), the underlying incentives of that money will seed its own destruction.

What happens if you have a coin based on "useful work" and you "solve" the problem you were hoping to solve. Now a lot of "miners" leave the network, presumably because they were only there to help solve that particular problem. Now you have a weak system, and a system subject to 51% attacks by adversarial miners, and therefore not a good money/coin.

I don't see how HN commenters (in large part) don't get this. It's the Single-responsibility Principle, just in a different context.

Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing

#12

Post by hakesdev »

If you use a money with an issuance scheme that doesn't derive from pure costs (useless things like hashing), the underlying incentives of that money will seed its own destruction.

What happens if you have a coin based on "useful work" and you "solve" the problem you were hoping to solve. Now a lot of "miners" leave the network, presumably because they were only there to help solve that particular problem. Now you have a weak system, and a system subject to 51% attacks by adversarial miners, and therefore not a good money/coin.

I don't see how HN commenters (in large part) don't get this. It's the Single-responsibility Principle, just in a different context.

Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing

#13

Post by Forbo »

Kiro wrote: post #7

How 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).

Even if you have people doubling or tripling up the work on something useful, the end result is infinitely more useful than bruteforced hashes.

Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing

#14

Post by jl2718 »

This may be misunderstanding the function of PoW. Bitcoin PoW provides three things: selection, security, and incentive. The compute resource burn is an externality, although, it also ends up providing an important function, economic distribution. For PoW to work,it has to be hard to produce, easy to verify, and most importantly, attest to one and only one state of the blockchain. The last part is where this fails as PoW. The solution to a puzzle is meaningless if the same solution can be shown as the result of two different inputs. So the puzzle must be practically unique to each proposed block (infinite possibilities), and ‘fair’ to each proposal. If you can find a useful puzzle with these properties, please don’t hold back.

Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing

#15

Post by j-pb »

hakesdev wrote: post #12

If you use a money with an issuance scheme that doesn't derive from pure costs (useless things like hashing), the underlying incentives of that money will seed its own destruction. What happens if you have a coin based on "useful work" and you "solve" the problem you were hoping to solve. Now a lot of "miners" leave the network, presumably because they were only there to help solve that particular problem. Now you ha…

There's plenty of usefull work that we won't run out of.

SAT solving is the prime candidate, because we have A LOT of NP hard problems in our day to day lives.

Weather simulations are another one, drug research is another one.

For the latter I'd argue that if we're at a point where we've erredicated all disease, we've also transcended as a society to a point where money has become obsolete.

Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing

#16

Post by Forbo »

hakesdev wrote: post #11
Forbo wrote: post #5

I'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.

If you use a money with an issuance scheme that doesn't derive from pure costs (useless things like hashing), the underlying incentives of that money will seed its own destruction. What happens if you have a coin based on "useful work" and you "solve" the problem you were hoping to solve. Now a lot of "miners" leave the network, presumably because they were only there to help solve that particular problem. Now you ha…

Considering the number of supercomputers that have been constructed since the days of ENIAC, I don't think we'll be running out of scientific computing problems any time soon. And if we somehow do manage to run out of computing problems, then I guess we've already succeeded.

Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing

#17

Post by mikepurvis »

keymone wrote: post #9
david_draco wrote: post #8

How 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.

I don't think that's really true. There are plenty of cases where we can decide collectively as a society that a thing is valuable or not-valuable and intentionally set a particular price for it. As an obvious example, no one would argue that hospitals in Texas should have been paying the "market rate" for electricity last week, and conversely, it would have been a scandal if someone had been mining bitcoin on the Texas grid, no matter what price they were paying per kWh.

A similar thing happens with water, where people are asked not to use their sprinklers during a dry spell. They can _afford_ to buy a lot of water at the market rate, and raising the price might not even change that (besides being super unfair to someone else who then might struggle to afford even enough water to drink).

So yeah, I think it's fair for us to say as a society that turning electricity into heat in the form of bitcoin mining is a gigantic and unacceptable waste of a resource that we'd like to use for other things.

Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing

#18

Post by [deleted] »

Forbo wrote: post #13
Kiro wrote: post #7

How 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).

Even if you have people doubling or tripling up the work on something useful, the end result is infinitely more useful than bruteforced hashes.

[deleted]

Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing

#19

Post by jMyles »

david_draco wrote: post #8

How 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.

We need to stop trying to shoehorn the state into places where it doesn't fit or belong.

Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing

#20

Post by keymone »

mikepurvis wrote: post #17
keymone wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think that's really true. There are plenty of cases where we can decide collectively as a society that a thing is valuable or not-valuable and intentionally set a particular price for it. As an obvious example, no one would argue that hospitals in Texas should have been paying the "market rate" for electricity last week, and conversely, it would have been a scandal if someone had been mining bitcoin on the Te…

> we can decide collectively as a society that a thing is valuable or not-valuable and intentionally set a particular price for it

yeah, that's exactly what's happening to bitcoin for last 10 years.

> turning electricity into heat in the form of bitcoin mining is a gigantic and unacceptable waste of a resource that we'd like to use for other things

first of all, heat is a sign of inefficiency, the better bitcoin mining gets the less heat it will produce. second - it's a gigantic and unacceptable waste of resources in your opinion, personally i very much disagree and think the opposite: decentralized financial security expressed directly in terms of energy required to subvert it is the largest discovery in financial theory since the concept of money itself, it is extremely valuable.

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