Gridcoin: Rewarding Scientific Distributed Computing
gridcoin.us
gridcoin.us
""" CureCoin Reaches #1 Ranking on Folding@home
As of the afternoon of August 29, 2017 (Eastern Time), the Curecoin Team 224497 earned the world's #1 rank on Stanford's Folding@home - a protein folding simulation Distributed Computing Network (DCN). In a little over 3 years, the team (including our merge-folding partners at Foldingcoin) collectively produced 160 billion points worth of molecular computations to support research in the areas of cancer, Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, Infectious Disease as well as helping scientists uncover new molecular dynamics through groundbreaking computational techniques. """
Unfortunatly BTC mining now runs almost entirely on ASICs that can't be used to compute anything but SHA-256.
There may be - or, very likely are - shortcuts for proof of research better than Grover's; which, when found, will also be very useful for science and medicine. However, that advantage is theoretically destabilizing for a distributed consensus network; which is also a strange conflict in incentives.
Sort of like buying "buy gold" commercials when the market was heading into the worst recession since the Great Depression.
SSL accelerators may benefit from the SHA256 ASIC optimizations incentivized by the bitcoin design.
"""The accelerator provides the RSA public-key algorithm, several widely used symmetric-key algorithms, cryptographic hash functions, and a cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generator"""
GPU prices are also lower now; probably due to demand pulling volume. The TPS (transactions per second) rate is doing much better these days.
How would you solve the local daretime problem in order with Git and signatures?
Every time I see this on HN, there are a lot of people who are excited because they think that this is somehow "a useful proof of work", or an alternative to proof of work. It doesn't actually have anything to do with proof of work.
Maybe the idea of paying people for scientific computing with newly-created crypto coins is a worthy innovation, but I suspect that much of the interest around this based around people who are confused about what proof of work is.
My criticisms: it's pretty easy for a user to set up BOINC and start contributing, but not so easy to integrate it with GRC and start collecting gridcoin. Their client software needs a usability overhaul. Also, the selection of projects by BOINC seems somewhat arbitrary - I'm not sure how one gets into their good graces, since I couldn't find public standards or an application process.
Imagine if you could have an equally secure cryptocurrency where all that computing power was diverted to curing cancer, discovering new drugs to treat dangerous diseases, understanding the human genome, researching dark matter, and so on. That's GridCoin.
And yet today Bitcoin is worth $14,484 and GridCoin is worth 12 cents.
Here the reward one gets purely depends on the score they get on specific BOINC projects, which can be seen as a single point of failure. So if someone is able to fudge their BOINC scores, they're able to create Gridcoins that they shouldn't get.
While other coins aren't as resourceful as this, I feel their network's security is backed by (atleast seemingly) air-tight cryptography. Not to say that Gridcoin is insecure currently, but the centralization with BOINC shows it doesn't have a bright future.
Yeah. I'm rooting for them to figure this out because it would be wonderful if all those GPUs could be doing science rather than arbitrary calculations, but if this coin ever went big, I can't see how it would deal with exploits like this.
* GridCoin is highly inflationary and there's no inbuilt means of curtailing the supply.
DOGE is my favorite crypto for exactly this reason.
My take: As long as people still "think in dollars" while they are spending cryptocurrency, purchasing power of cryptocurrencies will be pegged to the dollar. Neither gold nor bitcoin is "inflated" as currency. The dollar inflates (or doesn't), and if you want to pay for something denominated in dollars using something other than dollars, you simply convert at the current spot market rate. There won't be a Bitcoin macroeconomy until things are truly denominated in Bitcoin.
If you think about it carefully, it basically sounds an awful like trickle-down economics.
Of course, there's the babysitter's coop parable, but that seems like not a monetary failure, but the failure of a really silly centralized decision to make a unit of labor time be fixed instead of having the unit of labor float in value.
Disclaimer: I am no economist, I seem to disagree with most schools of though here and following is my private thinking with no other source available.
> The point of negative interest rates is to encourage borrowing
The point of lower interest rate is to encourage current consumption, both in consumption goods and investment goods, i.e. increase aggregate demand.
When do you want to do that? Well, if there is unemployment (as in proper willingness to work but no work available), quite obviously we would like to have more demand for goods/services in the society. Of course, some of the lower interesta rate goes to e.g. real estate and in ideal world that would be compensated with higher real estate taxes to avoid bubbles there.
When do you want to do the opposite? when there is too much demand compared to current production capacity, it actually makes sense to encourage people to consume (and invest) a bit less just today to avoid all kind of bubbles that seem so common in the times of economic overheating.
You actually can see lack of negative interest rates as a real market failure, when there is a lack of demand due to too high interest rates and economic values gets not produced because of that.
> silly centralized decision to make a unit of labor time be fixed instead of having the unit of labor float in value.
Well, apologies of being a bit sarcastic, but in my view you have two options:
1. You can believe in fairy tales about flexible labor prices and actually consider it good that people have lots of uncertainty about the value of their labor tomorrow.
2. You accept the reality that wages are sticky, and most people actually like the thing that they know how much they get paid tomorrow. Unfortunately in this option you must also accept that the aggregate demand needs to be managed less it gets chaotic and/or dies completely.
Only if you think that unbridled growth is an inherently good thing. Let's take an example, and say we run out if oil without a good substitute. Suddenly interest rates go up, because with an uncertain future nobody wants to count of the future productivity of any given individual. Do you run around and complain that there's a market failure; interest rates are too high, we need to encourage more consumption to keep the economy running!!! Does that seem like sensible policy to you?
> 2. You accept the reality that wages are sticky, and most people actually like the thing that they know how much they get paid tomorrow.
That's fine but the prescribed solution is to devalue the notional amount people get paid. So basically you are force feeding a lie. Moreover, it's one which hurts people getting paid less more than people getting paid more. Also, lower incomes are less flexible to quit their job and find a new one because their current one isn't paying as much in real value. I'd much much rather put companies in a position where they give lower income individuals a pay cut (or find a way to make their employee's labor more valuable) as a signal that they should look for a better paying situation than boil the water underneath them slowly. Anything less is coddling businesses.
This has nothing to do with growth, but with welfare not being created due to otherwise willing seller and buyer not being able to transact due to artificially restricted pricing in the market.
> That's fine but the prescribed solution is to devalue the notional amount people get paid.
I think you confuse inflation and interest rates. Negative interest rate does not devalue money (price of bread says the same over time), but if you happen to have savings, those will of course be deminishing over time. Obviously, almost by definition, it is rich people, not poor people that have savings and bear the pain of negative rates.
Rich people are not counting on savings interest to make money. They have investments. For example, land. With negative inflation rate, you encourage mortgage lending, which drives up the price of land, which is great for rich people. Similar careful analysis of what actually rich people do with their money will reveal likewise fashions by which a negative interest rate helps the wealthy.
Well if it's securing the blockchain it can't be that pointless.
Some good arguments here for why "useless" proof-of-work is actually quite useful: http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/
In other words, I think the necessary centralization of a project like Gridcoin is a large exploitable flaw.
Edit: this is well beyond my expertise, perhaps someone with a better understanding of information theory can prove the above statement wrong. In that case, I hope they go out and build a crypto of their own!