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Comment by roboticmind | Hacker News Reader

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 https://gridcoin.us

Note: I help work on the gridcoin.us website and have ~5000 Gridcoin, so I may be biased in my view of the coin :)

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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 in general. Hopefully you can find a way, but the Wikipedia statement seems inaccurate.

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

> 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).

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

Sorry I can't buy the idea. Once you have some oracle, you have more centralization than a properly decentralized currency. And then you end up with the worst of both worlds: as expensive and slow as a cryptocurrency, and as trust-dependent/weak as a centralized system (weak in the sense that there's a single point of failure and a single entity that you must trust).

Anything that can only be done with some degree of centralization should just use a PostgreSQL database instead, no point in using a blockchain.

> Once you have some oracle...

> ...single entity that you must trust...

It's not a single oracle. There are currently 6 that independently run and gather the same stats. The wallet compares each of those independent oracle's data to each other and makes sure it matches. There will almost certainly be more oracles in the futures

> Anything that can only be done with some degree of centralization should just use a PostgreSQL database instead, no point in using a blockchain.

You get more resiliency in running it through a blockchain. You would go from oracles having to coordinate in a tricky way to manipulate stuff to now being able to having a database where they could somewhat easily directly change balances, stop things from running, ect.

A blockchain has some degree of centralization. For instance, how the very first peers found in blockchains is fairly centralized and relies on a lot of hardcoded nodes or servers. Now you can also seek out some connection too manually if you really want to, but most* have decided not to do that and accepted the trade off. Everything has a degree of centralization. It's not an all or nothing proposition. It is where you want to move on the balance of completely centralization to decentralized

* Partly because many aren't aware of this, but it still applies to those that are aware too

> It's not a single oracle.

I didn't say "single". I'm out of this convo.

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

The oracles don't have the power to completely run everything. With the current split for rewards, 25% of new coins is from just staking. As well, because new blocks are made only proof of stake, a 51% type attack would be also be much tougher for the oracles conspire and to pull off. Even if they tried to redirect 100% of research rewards (28750 GRC/day) to one address, it would take over 900 days to even reach the same amount as the address with the largest balance (~6% of current coin supply) [1].

Further, there's also more resiliency. If the oracles somehow broke or conspired and all said everyone did zero work, the network would still run. Now granted it would not be great that only previously pending research and PoS rewards would be given out, but you could still send coins, run polls, etc.

[1] https://main.gridcoinstats.eu/address/ (excluding the very largest one (the foundation) because it's multisig and can't stake. In its case it would take 1000 days to reach)

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