Well, one area that Gridcoin isn't / hasn't been availed for is the fact that it (like folding@home) has projects that helped do research on COVID. Although folding@home didn't provide any monetary reward - at least Rosetta@home is a supported GRC project. Obviously the token price would need to be higher to make the break even cost of the servers & mining feasible, but it is a neat project.
Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
101–110 of 146 posts
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I'll admit it's not great right now, but I don't know if I understand what you view as a use case? If using it to get things of value with it is not a use case, then what coin or currency has any use case? Everything is a transfer of value even beyond just currencies be it paid in time or other things
> Reward paid in, let me guess, more coins. self fueling like most other coins. Thats not a real usecase
It's also worth noting that you don't have to go through it if you use a pool, and there's work on making it not require pools if you don't want to start out with any Gridcoin. If you look up Gridcoin and "Manual rewards claim" you'll find some of the discussion about it.
> so it has religion-like properties, awesome /s not a use case
I was thinking more in terms of some of the reasons why Gridcoin's developers have Gridcoin - not necessarily advocating for others to do the same. I should have clarified that I didn't think this was a use case
I should also mention that having Gridcoin helps you in polls. Gridcoin has a system of polls and the polls are weighted by how much work you do in BOINC and how many coins you have. Note that it's your amount of those before a poll so you can't try to gain more influence after learning of a poll. It of course has its own issues and discussions about how or if votes should be weighted
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#103Earlier 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…
The website appears to represent it accurately, and exciting for all the reasons that BOINC is. The Wikipedia article says: “Gridcoin attempts to address and ease the environmental energy impact of cryptocurrency mining through its proof-of-research and proof-of-stake protocols, as compared to the proof of work system used by Bitcoin.” I don’t see this implementation as having any relevance to cryptocurrency mining i…
I know that many (including one of the core developers) have tried to correct various things on that Wikipedia page, but my understanding is that there's an admin that keeps reverting most changes
> I don’t see this implementation as having any relevance to cryptocurrency mining
That's why a lot of people refer to running BOINC to get Gridcoin as "crunching" instead of mining to help distinguish it
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the more famous examples of a BOINC project is Rosetta@home, which asks users to determine how proteins fold. Isn't this exactly what you stipulate? You just let the binary hash of the block encode a sequence of amino acids, and then have the output be a valid block hash if the hash of the corresponding protein fold data has enough 0 bits at the beginning.
who validates that the protein was folded correctly? Validating that the hash of some nonce contains enough leading zeroes is very easy for the network to validate. But verifying that users are correctly computing the protein folding (rather than quickly dumping out invalid folds to test hash values) seems like a difficult problem for the network to validate.
This is a good point. I was assuming that computing a protein fold was something that could be done relatively quickly, but it seems like these simulations are actually much more computationally intensive than that.
This is obviously not my area of expertise, but I wonder if there is any way to make more efficient but still useful computational questions about protein folding. For example, if we try to fold just part of a protein (only 100 or so amino acids, say) and do it at a much lower fidelity of simulation, is the result still helpful?
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#105How 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.
Regulation worked for the ozone hole and river pollution. Nothing else did.
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I always understood the security of block-chains as a race between the good and the bad agents. Both are extending their respective chains as fast as they can. A bad-agent, who wishes to double-spend has to rewrite history, and therefore has to start a few step behind the good agent. To succeed, the bad agent has to overtake the good agent. Even if both have the same speed (i.e. 50% computational power each), the goo…
An attacker does not have to wait in order to produce a parallel chain. He can mine his separate chain immediately after submitting the transaction.
Even with less than 50% hashrate, he is bound to find a few blocks in a row from time to time. Keep in mind that he can run the attack as often as he wants. This is why the recommendation is to wait for 6 blocks - it is very unlikely (not impossible) that somebody with a 20% hashrate ever finds 6 blocks in a row.
When an attack is successful, everybody will mine on the attackers chain - including the honest miners. The attackers chain is valid after all, it just has a different valid transaction set.
The significance of the 51% hashpower is that the attacker is guaranteed to succeed over a long-enough time horizon.
Reducing or removing the costs of mining a parallel chain (even for miners with 20% hashpower) reduces their cost to mine a parallel chain and weakens the security guarantee. If a miner can work on a side chain and get paid for protein folding at the same time, he can keep doing it without losing money on electricity. When he finally succeeds, he will also cash in the mining reward.
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's more a history question than a technical question. What's the use of Bitcoin or Ethereum?
Bitcoin was mean to be p2p cash. It has no legitimate use case anymore as it obviously failed to be p2p cash. Ethereum tried to be many things mostly a decentral computer. Turned out to be a super expensive decentral computer and that it isn't really so decentral in the current version. However its technically used this way by some people so that de-facto means it has a valid use case. It can hardly compete against n…
The Bitcoin idea didn't fail to be cash. BTC failed to be cash because it forced a permanent 1mb block size limit. If you want to see the original Bitcoin idea working as a charm, use Bitcoin Cash (BCH).
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#108How 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 uses Proof-of-stake and not Proof-of-work to secure the block chain.
Additionally it has a Proof-Of-Research layer on top that reward the scientific research processing.
Each whitelisted project gets its chare of a set amount of Gridcoins that in minted and distributed to the individual contributors. The amount is currently distributed equally across whitelisted project. So more project the less will be given to a potentially fraudulent project.
How each project verify the tasks is more or less up to the project to handle. The individual Boinc project has incentives to do this as they use the result in their scientific report (falls result will be bad for them).
One solution to this problem is to have multiple crunchers do the same task and compare results, if the tasks is distributed randomly then an increase in the number of equal tasks can be used to increase confidence in the result. Eg a monte carlo simulation can be bone multiple times and the result can be compared, if it is within a given threshold. (this part is the responsibility of the individual project)
Other tasks might have hard to compute result that are easy to verify for the host similar to Prof-Of-Work on other blockchains.
More Boinc project will help to decentralize the reward, limit the risk of running out of research to do, and if one malicious project by chance get whitelisted then the impact will be limited.
The contributors contribution to each project is gathers by Oracles that compares their findings and this result is committed to the superblock.
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bitcoin was mean to be p2p cash. It has no legitimate use case anymore as it obviously failed to be p2p cash. Ethereum tried to be many things mostly a decentral computer. Turned out to be a super expensive decentral computer and that it isn't really so decentral in the current version. However its technically used this way by some people so that de-facto means it has a valid use case. It can hardly compete against n…
The Bitcoin idea didn't fail to be cash. BTC failed to be cash because it forced a permanent 1mb block size limit. If you want to see the original Bitcoin idea working as a charm, use Bitcoin Cash (BCH).
Or check out Monero!
Re: Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
We need to stop trying to shoehorn the state into places where it doesn't fit or belong.
Regulation worked for the ozone hole and river pollution. Nothing else did.
So let's crack the fuck down on externalities of power generation and consumption. Ban fossil fuels on an aggressive timeframe. Make car-free cities everywhere. Stop all wars right now today.
But those things are orthogonal (and not even adjacent) to selecting an algorithm for PoW consensus.
I also want to caution against circlejerking over clean water and ozone restoration. Things on a global scale are still pretty dire; the solution is ahead of us, not behind, and it's not clear what it will be.