Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing

gridcoin.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 146 posts

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

#41

Post by wyldfire »

Robotbeat wrote: post #37
VMG wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a penalty for producing an invalid fold. Folds are validated.

I understand that the desire for a Proof of Work to be useful is strong and that's what is the appeal for these kinds of things. You should know that everyone would be totally onboard if there were a way to keep critical cryptocoin properties AND make the computation useful. The naysayers here don't dislike folding or any other useful computations. They just have experience with the cryptocoin design elements.

There's some subtleties to how a cryptocoin works that aren't obvious and they're absolutely critical to making it work. Bitcoin can have competing chains of blocks that eventually get orphaned. And it's because there's this race condition while block solutions are propagated across the network. Eventually, after enough blocks the network agrees on which chain wins. But imagine if you could know how the next block would start - what its inputs would be. You could start solving that block now.

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

#42

Post by Robotbeat »

wyldfire wrote: post #41
Robotbeat wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a penalty for producing an invalid fold. Folds are validated.

I understand that the desire for a Proof of Work to be useful is strong and that's what is the appeal for these kinds of things. You should know that everyone would be totally onboard if there were a way to keep critical cryptocoin properties AND make the computation useful. The naysayers here don't dislike folding or any other useful computations. They just have experience with the cryptocoin design elements. There'…

That would only help you if you had a novel, valid folding solution.

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

#43

Post by stonesweep »

gruez wrote: post #10
stonesweep wrote: post #4

I 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 alr…

> profitable

...I'd settle for "break even" and have it simply pay for itself to perform the scientific work. My personal choice is to participate in the World Community Grid and I tried everything from a cloud server to a 20-core dual E5-2660v2 (rented) and even that amount of power cannot pay for it's monthly (super cheap, $75) rental fees. A laptop with an i5-3320 (something like that) cannot even pay for it's electricity use generating GRC.

Not profitable, just break even - that's all a guy like me asks for; it's more efficient if I take cold hard cash and donate it to a comparable cause than it does to run WCG nodes and expect GRC to just cover the electricity cost, ignore the hardware. I don't want to be profitable, just have any rig pay for it's electricity use - that's it. GRC cannot even cover that spread in finances.

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

#44

Post by istjohn »

jMyles wrote: post #19
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.

I can't think of anythink more suitable for state intervention than solving the coordination problem to ensure the continued habitability of planet Earth.

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

#45

Post by VMG »

Robotbeat wrote: post #37
VMG wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a penalty for producing an invalid fold. Folds are validated.

A miner can secretly build a blockchain that reverses transactions with little cost. He'll still get rewarded for correct protein folding.

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

#46

Post by Robotbeat »

VMG wrote: post #45
Robotbeat wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a penalty for producing an invalid fold. Folds are validated.

A miner can secretly build a blockchain that reverses transactions with little cost. He'll still get rewarded for correct protein folding.

A penalty mechanism is possible that disincentives such behavior and makes it impractical. Filecoin has such a system. But a powerful enough mining pool (China has 65% of mining power) can also do this for Bitcoin.

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

#47

Post by algo646464 »

VMG wrote: post #32

Proof-of-Work only makes sense if there is an opportunity cost for mining an invalid chain. If mining an invalid chain is "useful" in some way, the security guarantee disappears.

Can you explain why the security guarantee disappears in more detail?

I thought that the security of a block-chain comes primarily from the difficulty of rewriting the chain of blocks. To do that you will have to fork and recompute the chain from some point back in history (say 5 blocks ago). This puts at a disadvantage since the rest of the network is ahead of you by 5 blocks and will continue adding new blocks. So you will need a lot of computational power to rewrite history and also overtake the rest of the network.

Why would some additional reward for mining (by solving a useful problem) break this?

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

#48

Post by roboticmind »

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…

The coin is proof of stake based. The rewards for BOINC come on top of staking. Each BOINC project that is rewarded has its stats looked up by a system of oracles and each node verifies that the oracles match up. The project themselves can be removed if they act up and there's a system for voting on which project to add and remove

If you have any more questions feel free to ask me or check out the Gridcoin website https://gridcoin.us

Note: I help work on the gridcoin.us website and have ~5000 Gridcoin, so I may be biased in my view of the coin :)

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

#49

Post by Forbo »

ashtonkem wrote: post #38

Whenever a new coin shows up, the only interesting question is whether it’s a scam, a joke, or an earnest yet ridiculous attempt to solve a problem that blockchains in no way solve.

New? Gridcoin has been around since 2013.

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

#50

Post by VMG »

algo646464 wrote: post #47
VMG wrote: post #32

Proof-of-Work only makes sense if there is an opportunity cost for mining an invalid chain. If mining an invalid chain is "useful" in some way, the security guarantee disappears.

Can you explain why the security guarantee disappears in more detail? I thought that the security of a block-chain comes primarily from the difficulty of rewriting the chain of blocks. To do that you will have to fork and recompute the chain from some point back in history (say 5 blocks ago). This puts at a disadvantage since the rest of the network is ahead of you by 5 blocks and will continue adding new blocks. So…

You don't actually need 51% of the mining power to perform a double-spend attack. Just by pure chance, even with 10% of the mining power, you will find 5 blocks in a row sometimes.

With a "wasteful" PoW, miners would not attempt this as they would hemorrhage money doing that.

Withe a "useful" PoW, miners could have an outside funding source like some institute that pays for protein folding. The would not lose money in their attempt to produce a minority chain (in proportion to the "usefulness" of their PoW)

Post reply on HN