Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
51–60 of 146 posts
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
The external reward in "useful" PoW is given to all miners, good and bad. So everyone is equally incentivized. In fact it should actually increase the participation in the network, e.g. those who don't care about cryptocurrency but are interested in the "useful" problem being solved.
The external reward by itself provides no competitive advantage. It reduces everyone's costs by the same amount. Rewriting history still remains difficult.
So what am I missing here?
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#53For those that are wondering how this works, Gridcoin uses PoS - not PoW - and then rewards for research on top of it. It is not locked into any algorithm because it's not PoW. There are currently 18 different BOINC project [1] that it rewards. New projects can be voted in or can be voted off.
To try to reduce the centralization, there is a system of oracles that gathers the stats from each project and the nodes verify that the oracles match each other. As well, each project only consists of 1/18th of the rewards [2] from research and there's also new coins rewarded for just staking, so if a project acts up, they wouldn't be able to largely manipulate coin supply.
If you have any more questions about it, feel free to ask me
[1] https://gridcoin.us/guides/whitelist.htm
[2] https://gridcoin.us/wiki/magnitude.html
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
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oh heck yeah. Climate justice is the issue of our age. I'm not saying not to take it seriously (few are anymore, right?).
However, choosing a PoW algorithm is unrelated to this task (and also risks giving cosmetic satisfaction while solving nothing).
Continued habitability of planet Earth is made dramatically more likely by supplanting monetary systems which:
* encourage people to treat money like a hot potato, better swapped for cheap plastic crap
* Make wars (the absolutely King Kong of carbon emission among human activities) much less expensive at the margins by slushily funding industrial complexes.
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
The external reward in "useful" PoW is given to all miners, good and bad. So everyone is equally incentivized. In fact it should actually increase the participation in the network, e.g. those who don't care about cryptocurrency but are interested in the "useful" problem being solved. The external reward by itself provides no competitive advantage. It reduces everyone's costs by the same amount. Rewriting history stil…
Rewriting history needs to be expensive, not just difficult. If you decrease the cost of writing history, you decrease the penalty of participating in a minority chain.
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#56For 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…
Folding can be verified easier than it can be produced.
You can verify that some fold achieves some energy state. What you cannot efficiently verify is that it's the best possible fold, achieving the global minimum energy.
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#57If 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…
Satoshi was correct to assume that the most useful work is securing the network
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#58Does anyone still own this? It came out awhile back and Bittrex dropped it in like 2018.
A lot of people are still running BOINC and getting Gridcoins in return. The difficulty of staking has increased a lot since 2018.
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#59This 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 ht…
In that case, why have proof of stake at all? Wouldn't it be simpler to just have the set of oracles alone facilitate the currency, since they already effectively have the power to?
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ht…
In that case, why have proof of stake at all? Wouldn't it be simpler to just have the set of oracles alone facilitate the currency, since they already effectively have the power to?
The market didnt tolerate oracle controlled coins when Gridcoin was released
The market does tolerate that now
Today you wouldnt use a new blockchain you would just issue an erc20 token with an oracle server having an admin key for distribution. You could have people merkle mine to accumulate a stake, but this is primarily to keep the “crypto/computational” branding for that audience, as the oracle aspect would still be centralized