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Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing

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

#121

Post by dang »

roboticmind wrote: post #112
dang wrote: post #100

If curious, past threads: Help Take the Fight to COVID-19 with BOINC and Folding@Home - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22658139 - March 2020 (61 comments) Gridcoin: Rewarding Scientific Distributed Computing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16031912 - Dec 2017 (55 comments) BOINC – Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12524921 - Sept 2016 (21 comments)…

For those reading and not familiar with Gridcoin and BOINC, I should note that BOINC is separate from Gridcoin. The threads about BOINC are indeed related, but about a slightly different topic. Just wanted to note that since I have seen some confusion stemming from it in the past Separately, would it be possible to change the submission link to something with a little more information such as gridcoin.us? I have been…

Yes, URL changed now from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridcoin. I wish I had thought of that (or seen your comment) sooner!

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

#122

Post by knocte »

roboticmind wrote: post #48
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 ht…

> 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

For cryptocurrency noobs: the word "oracle" while seeming to be a buzzword that tries to provide some technical legitimacy, actually means "a node with authority", which basically goes against the whole point of cryptocurrency (decentralization).

Move on, nothing to see here. Disappointed that this reached HN frontpage (and wikipedia).

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

#123

Post by jmngomes »

bowmessage wrote: post #98
fogof wrote: post #97

Earlier 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.

BOINC tasks are validated by running multiple executions on different hosts/users and comparing results; credit, and hence GRC, is only attributed to tasks with valid results: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/CreditNew

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

#124

Post by AgentME »

Robotbeat wrote: post #116
AgentME wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that when a miner announces a block with a solution, an attacker could immediately announce their own alternative block with the same solution and there would be a chance that the network would take up their block first.

But if the legitimate miner announces & signs a hash of the solution well beforehand, they can prove theirs is the legitimate solution.

Then that adds a delay to each block being broadcast to the network. It also means that the longer a miner waits to broadcast the block, the more time a different miner has to finish a proof-of-work and claim the next block first. Miners are all racing each other, so they're all going to try to wait the most minimum amount.

The logic around only accepting a block if you previously saw a signed hash is vulnerable to sybil attacks. An attacker could run thousands of nodes on the p2p network, never relay anyone else's signed hashes, steal the proof-of-works from completed blocks and then broadcast signed hashes of its own blocks with the stolen pows and then broadcast those blocks. Many users might find themselves connected to only nodes run by the attacker and would get tricked into accepting the attacker's chain.

The proof-of-work not depending on the blockchain state means that a miner could queue up lots of complete proof-of-works and then mint a ton of blocks with them all at once to do a 51% attack.

Any solution to this is either going to be centralized or look like proof-of-stake, and at that point, the proof-of-work is extra and not actually load-bearing at all.

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

#125

Post by noxer »

lifeformed wrote: post #119
noxer wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How are those issues any different from other currencies or coins? It really comes down to trust and security, which this offers just like others do. At a high level view it's just basically bitcoin but with coins created through externally useful work.

So its just another "better" bitcoin. But bitcoin is already useless. And we already have FBA coins instead of PoW/PoS which are way more efficient. It remove the external "useful" work completely.

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

#126

Post by noxer »

roboticmind wrote: post #113
stonesweep wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In it's heyday during 2018 it got up to 15-17 cents (USD), but by the end of 2018 it was at 1/2 cent and by the end of 2019 it was at 1/10 cent. It's been delisted from most of the major exchanges and pulled from wallet apps like Coinomi; your observations above are correct, you need to have coin to make coin and you cannot make coin quickly without throwing a lot of hardware at it. You must use their wallet, which i…

It's worth noting that a lot of work (4500+ hours in ten months of development and testing[1]) has been put into a massive rewrite of the wallet in 5.0.0. The wallet is a lot more stable than it was when you last used it, the GUI is much better, tons of old crappy code was removed, thing are more secure in general, etc. There's also much better testing of releases now too [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gridcoin/comment…

Let em guess, the work was paid with gridcoins.

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

#127

Post by VMG »

algo646464 wrote: post #111
VMG wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ok that makes sense. But I wonder why doesn't this problem also arise in the current Proof-of-Work system. A sufficiently well-funded group, with about 20% hash-rate can try to extend the current head of the blockchain by 6 fake blocks at every time. If they succeed, i.e. all 6 fake blocks are mined before the real network mines 6 real blocks, then they can publish their parallel chain with the fake transactions and…

Yup, this is indeed a weakness of the current PoW system.

People often misunderstand it to be completely secure if no attacker has more than 50% hashrate.

In reality (and as described in the whitepaper), the 51% limit is described as the state where no number of confirmations is sufficient.

If an attacker has less than 50% hashpower, you can plug in some numbers like hashpower and cost of attack and come up with a number of confirmations that is likely to be secure.

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

#128

Post by roboticmind »

knocte wrote: post #122
roboticmind wrote: post #48

Earlier 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…

> 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 For cryptocurrency noobs: the word "oracle" while seeming to be a buzzword that tries to provide some technical legitimacy, actually means "a node with authority", which basically goes against the whole point of cryptocurrency (decentralization). Move on, nothing to see here. Disappoin…

I'd agree that it is more centralized than I'd like, but it doesn't defeat the whole point. Gridcoin has a different purpose than most cryptocurrencies. It rewards science and is more decentralized than most coins that try similar goals [1]. I'd also note that the oracles have less direct power over the coin than you might think. See one of the comments I made about it earlier [2]

The alternative was previously flooding every project and downloading a massive gigabytes of data from the projects. It wasn't maintainable and a project left from the large amount of bandwidth it used up. As Gridcoin grew, it became a larger and larger issue. As well, some projects are now requiring tokens to access the stats (for GDPR reasons), so for some project, it became impossible to reward them without anything like this

> ...seeming to be a buzzword that tries to provide some technical legitimacy...

I'd also note that most things about Gridcoin usually doesn't use the term oracle (uses scrapers instead). I was using it here since I thought it would be a term more here were familiar with

[1] https://gridcoin.us/wiki/advantages-and-features.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26240413

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

#129

Post by webinvest »

noxer wrote: post #125
lifeformed wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are those issues any different from other currencies or coins? It really comes down to trust and security, which this offers just like others do. At a high level view it's just basically bitcoin but with coins created through externally useful work.

So its just another "better" bitcoin. But bitcoin is already useless. And we already have FBA coins instead of PoW/PoS which are way more efficient. It remove the external "useful" work completely.

Such as?

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

#130

Post by roboticmind »

noxer wrote: post #126
roboticmind wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that a lot of work (4500+ hours in ten months of development and testing[1]) has been put into a massive rewrite of the wallet in 5.0.0. The wallet is a lot more stable than it was when you last used it, the GUI is much better, tons of old crappy code was removed, thing are more secure in general, etc. There's also much better testing of releases now too [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gridcoin/comment…

Let em guess, the work was paid with gridcoins.

Originally the main developers didn't request any compensation for this, but yes they will be compensated in Gridcoin. The reason for this is partly that Gridcoin is really community run and doesn't have much USD or other fiat just lying around, but with the history of the foundation address (not an organization), there's a fair amount of Gridcoin that can be spent on it and other tasks
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