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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

#81

Post by fallingknife »

VMG wrote: post #28
j-pb wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you explain this in more detail or point me to something that does?

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

#82

Post by mikepurvis »

beiller wrote: post #75
mikepurvis wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 Hi I live in a cold place! Interestingly, bitcoin mining is an electric space heater with 100% efficiency. I could theoretically heat my home. Currently I use natural gas (which emits CO2 aka a greenhouse gas). The furnace runs at 95% efficiency I think. If my electri…

A fair point, but in reality almost all of the Bitcoin heat is vented to the environment— no one is seriously capturing it for reuse at this point.

Also important to note that resistance heating ("100%") is in fact not the most efficient way to use electricity for warming a space. The most efficient is with a heat pump, where you're actually moving the heat from outside to inside.

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

#83

Post by neolefty »

noxer wrote: post #74
deeeeplearning wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Whats the use for the coin? Its an incentive obviously but its only so because it has a price tag. Who should buy the coin from me if I "mined" one and what would he do with it? This is the same for any crypto coin. Certainly not unique to Gridcoin.

That doesn't answer the question.

It's more a history question than a technical question. What's the use of Bitcoin or Ethereum?

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

#84

Post by neolefty »

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).

It depends on out-of-loop review of the oracles by people, to ensure they stay honest, and that new oracles are honest.

Over time, as problems come and go, I assume oracles will be added and retired, so this coin will require manual maintenance. A necessary cost of being interesting?

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

#85

Post by woadwarrior01 »

tromp wrote: post #56
Robotbeat wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You can verify that some fold achieves some energy state.

IMO, that makes it similar to Difficulty[1] (and the related target) in Bitcoin's POW scheme.

[1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty

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

#86

Post by maerF0x0 »

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

Similar to what stonesweep said, some people have different economics. For example, I have an old computer sitting around. And my home heats by electricity in the winter. Therefore any time I need to heat my home it's 0 marginal cost to instead do mining (of any kind). IMO this is the real future of green efficiency, finding the places where the energy was already "spent" on a high value task, and add a low value task in the chain. Another example could be server farms could water cool and use waste heat for elec generation, low temp plastic melting, or residential hot water...

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

#87

Post by maerF0x0 »

beiller wrote: post #75
mikepurvis wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 Hi I live in a cold place! Interestingly, bitcoin mining is an electric space heater with 100% efficiency. I could theoretically heat my home. Currently I use natural gas (which emits CO2 aka a greenhouse gas). The furnace runs at 95% efficiency I think. If my electri…

> Interestingly, bitcoin mining is an electric space heater with 100% efficiency.

Technically you can get greater than 100% with electric heat pumps. But you're correct if you're marginally comparing just a space heater with/or without a CPU inside it.

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

#88

Post by neolefty »

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.

This is an excellent point IMO. Unregulated central institutions (such as currency) lead to anarchy, in which public interest is not aligned with benefits. For example, pure Bitcoin serves only Bitcoin, with disregard for laws about, say, money laundering. If you can find a way to make it work for you, great — but that will only align with the public good by chance.

GridCoin seems like an attempt to mitigate that with internal regulation — it seems like the assumption is that GridCoin commits to proof-of-work tasks that are publicly beneficial.

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

#89

Post by noxer »

roboticmind wrote: post #77
noxer wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats the use for the coin? Its an incentive obviously but its only so because it has a price tag. Who should buy the coin from me if I "mined" one and what would he do with it?

As one of the commenters mention, it's an issue with all cryptocurrencies. Right now one of the reason people want to get Gridcoin is to get enough to stake regularly to earn their rewards or because they believe in the coin. In the future, there's been some ideas floating around that I think are very interesting. For instance, one idea that's been floating around is to create a service that accepts GRC and offers as…

No, its not with all, maybe with most but regardless this doesn't add any anything. I want to know specifically for this coin.

>to get enough to stake regularly to earn their rewards

Reward paid in, let me guess, more coins. self fueling like most other coins. Thats not a real usecase

>because they believe in the coin

so it has religion-like properties, awesome /s not a use case

>create a service that accepts GRC and offers assistance to researchers for setting up a BOINC project

so its used as a medium of exchange which boils down to the price tag it has. you could just pay someone with normal money no one would want to be paid in gridcoin unless one gets overpaid. Obviously this is also not a use case.

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

#90

Post by tromp »

woadwarrior01 wrote: post #85
tromp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You can verify that some fold achieves some energy state. IMO, that makes it similar to Difficulty[1] (and the related target) in Bitcoin's POW scheme. [1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty

except that with difficulty, you know the expected effort needed to pass the threshold. with folding of arbitrary proteins, you have no idea.
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