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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

#21

Post by fsflover »

Forbo wrote: post #16
hakesdev wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But can you change the task underlying your cryptocurrency without breaking the network?

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

#23

Post by dnautics »

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.

Don't forget that the usefulness of brute forced hashes is that it lets you have decentralized trust, so, you may be off by a factor of infinity.

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

#24

Post by mtalantikite »

j-pb wrote: post #15
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.

Yeah, just last night I was curious about any blockchain approaches that might be out there that try and do something more useful and found people trying to use SAT solving as the base. This paper in particular seemed pretty interesting and I do hope we get to a place where we can at least be working on NP hard problems while transacting on a blockchain: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3297280.3297319

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

#26

Post by wyldfire »

For most cryptocoins, you want a proof-of-work to be: (1) easy for a computer to verify, (2) hard for a computer to perform, (3) impossible to predict for a given 'block' and (4) decentralized and untrusted.

If it's a novel scientific problem it won't be all of these. An interesting exception is prime numbers. Primecoin [1] has a useful proof-of-work: it finds Cunningham chains of primes.

If you don't like the energy consumed by a proof of work, you should probably use something else like proof of stake. Any clever idea to try and steer the computational power to SETI@home or protein folding won't have the critical qualities of most cryptocoins.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin

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

#27

Post by ilammy »

fsflover wrote: post #21
Forbo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But can you change the task underlying your cryptocurrency without breaking the network?

If the network has been designed for this in the first place – why shouldn't you be able to?

With Gridcoin you can participate in a number of eligible BOINC projects [1] and get rewards for computing on any of them. The network can add or remove projects.

[1]: https://gridcoin.ddns.net/pages/project-list.php

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

#28

Post by VMG »

j-pb wrote: post #15
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.

This is besides the point, and the parent didn't quite explain it correctly.

If there is no opportunity cost for mining, there is no penalty for mining an invalid chain therefore no security.

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

#29

Post by dfgdghdf »

jl2718 wrote: post #14

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…

Exactly this. The PoW scheme must commit you to a particular chain.

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

#30

Post by Robotbeat »

jl2718 wrote: post #14

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…

Can you just hash a new solution to the puzzle with the new proposed block?
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