Gridcoin: a simple investment thesis | Hacker News Reader

Gridcoin: a simple investment thesis

suiteki.medium.com

65 pointsdidier441 comments

Gridcoin is great. I originally got into Bitcoin mining in 2009, largely because of my previous involvement with SETI@Home, Folding@Home, etc, so BOINC has a special place in my heart as a project.

The thing is though, the long term economic viability of GRC is basically zero, simply due to the fact that it essentially allows anyone who runs any of these BOINC projects to print money for themselves.

This is a generic problem across the various projects that try to do this sort of "proof of science" type approach. Whoever controls the dataset being crunched essentially controls monetary supply. It's very hard to come up with a useful problem for people to crunch on which is provably fair, which is why Bitcoin just hashes random nonces.

Of course these markets are irrational, look where DOGE was able to get, so maybe GRC goes 10000x and everyone gets a Yacht, but as the total market cap increases, the likelihood of bad actors in the system goes up as well, and GRC is fundamentally defenseless against this type of attack.

That said, it's an awesome project, and IMO earning GRC is quite a bit more fun than watching your numbers go up on some website's scoreboard. If you want to show your support for BOINC miners, by all means, buy up stacks of GRC, just don't expect massive returns from it.

It's worth noting that one project only accounts for 1/19th of the current rewards for research and 0 of the rewards for staking. They do not have near complete control of the monetary supply. As well, as more projects are added to the whitelist that 1/19 fraction grows smaller

Additionally if a project were to try to manipulate things, it's hard to do anything on a large scale without it being noticed. With it being noticed, a poll would almost certainly come up and get voted yes on to remove the project from the whitelist.

In terms of those who gather stats from those projects, it requires at least 60% rounded up of the scrapers (who pull the stats) to exactly match. This is currently 4/6 although there will likely be more scrapers in the future. You'd have to collude with multiple people, and in a way that could also be easily detected from anyone cross comparing stats on BOINC and stats on Gridcoin.

For the last part, yeah, it's for the science, and not for the money for me anyway. The Gridcoin I get for it is just a nice bonus

Previous thread about GRC from ~37 days ago, same conversations starting here already tackled there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26236325

According to an involved dev the coin has no use case at all. Its printed money to act as incentive/reward for doing something no one would actually pay for.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238962

That is not what I said at all. Those are your own words.

I've already explained in that thread why the "no one would actually pay for" part is false as well, and you are mixing up different things here. No new coins are minted for development, and that is not the primary purpose of Gridcoin at all. Additionally many people do and have run BOINC (what Gridcoin is minted in reward for) without getting any compensation. BOINC existed for 10 years before Gridcoin did.

Further your definition of use case is very different from mine as for instance it excludes for instance using it as a currency for transactions. From what I understand of your definition, you view almost all cryptocurrencies as without any use case. This is different than what it comes across as saying to others here about Gridcoin.

As well I don't work on the coin directly - mostly on the site and wiki. I wouldn't call myself a dev on the coin. As well I haven't requested any Gridcoin from anyone for the work I do on the site if you wanted to talk about the "no one would actually pay for" part of development.

You have continued to say false things about the coin and more and it is quite frankly ticking me off. I'm not normally this frustrated in my responses, but you have continued to pushed my buttons.

I'm not continuing this discussion, but just want to clarify for any others reading this.

You could not name a single use case in the whole discussion. So there is none. That statement is correct until proven otherwise. The burden of proof lies with you.

Sometimes I wonder if these articles are real or from The Onion. Why would someone doing research want to integrate something that literally makes a penny (1 GRD == 0.010754 USD). The real money is in grants. Write up a good grant proposal and you can get tens of thousands of dollars.

I'm not the biggest fan of crypto, but I do acknowledge its success in certain areas. I'm just puzzled why so many people think its the solution to every problem.

I think you may be missing what Gridcoin is doing. It is not going to the scientists themselves, but the people using their computers to help scientists. As well, I believe many of the projects Gridcoin rewards are grant funded (separate from Gridcoin)

Note: I have around 5000 Gridcoin, so I may be biased in my view of the coin :)

> Note: I have around 5000 Gridcoin, so I may be biased in my view of the coin :)

This is one issue with crypto. It's hard to tell whether people hyping it own it because you believe in it or whether you believe in it because you own it.

I think the best solution is to not take anothers word for for its worth. Have a look at the system itself and tackle the issue of whether it benefits society/yourself/Group You Like, or not.

I also mine Gridcoin. I don't know how much I have ATM, but I like that even when I'm away living my life, in some small part I'm helping a scientist find something new. The reward is just there to help with on boarding in my mind.

If the coin ever jumped in price and a few miners see it as an investment, well hey its better than mining bitcoin and producing less useful data.

Another problem is whether you believe you own anything that exists, or whether you just participate in some shared belief in its existence.

I agree with the other commenters that the best way to get an idea of it is to look at it yourself.

It's hard to trust people in general, so that's why I left it in for more transparency. I think that's an issue that goes to more than just crypto too unfortunately. I'd agree that it's worse in the crypto world in general, however.

If you want some degree of evidence that I believe in the coin, you can take a look at some of the work I've done[1][2]. None of this can tell you anything with high confidence unfortunately with out any real knowledge of each other, so the best solution is not to take my complete word on everything. Most of the work I've done is on the site and wiki system (208 commits)[1], and I've done a little bit on the wallet itself (19 commits)[2], but my C++ abilities aren't the best, so not as much as the site.

Lastly, 5000 Gridcoin is really not a lot in comparison to most of the network, but still of course raises potential conflicts of interests. I know that it's still hard to trust anyone on this because there's a lot of shill type people in the crypto world unfortunately, so it's best to look at the system itself

[1] https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Gridcoin-Site/graphs/c... [2] https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Gridcoin-Research/grap...

> It's hard to tell whether people hyping it own it because you believe in it or whether you believe in it because you own it.

Why does it matter? It shouldn't if you look at their arguments.

It’s usually not that hard to tell.

it's not competing with grant but the voluntary BOINC work ... I think Gridcoin is one of the few great projects, of a direction in crypto that is imo underappreciated, where proof of work would actually be doing useful work

Its not competing, it prints money to reward people for voluntary work. Witch attracts people who would not do the voluntary work. And it attracts gamblers who throw real money at it in hope of price gains. So essentially it gives money from gamblers to "voluntaries" although very very likely the gamblers and the "voluntaries" are mostly the same people. So its basically just screwing over gamblers with the pitch that their loses are used for something somewhat useful. While at the same time some small group of people probably enriched themself along the way.

How is it screwing over the gamblers? Why would it be a problem if people got rich?

Why would they get rich if they give money to pay people for research in exchanges for worthless tokens?

The research, even if it leads to something good for humans, does not add any value to the token. The token only has a value because gamblers speculate on a higher price in the future. The higher price can only be reached if more new gambler speculates on an even higher price and so on. We have a finite amount of gamblers so this can not go on forever and make everyone rich. Instead each wave of new gamblers makes the previous rich. But each wave has to be larger which untimely means the last and largest wave will be screwed over. Which Im totally fine with as long as people know the risk of being that last wave.

The problem is on the side line there are people who never risked to be in that last wave because they simply printed the tokens and sold it. Like for example the devs that paid themself with these tokens thus inflating the supply which basically steals value form everyone who holds the token.

Exchange value as such has value only because of speculation, so what, nobody gets rich solely on their merit. Of course all that are cyrpto speculators are aware of the risks, people holding dollars aren't.

So your main problem is with devs, the only ones who are actually doing work not just contributing machine work?

All these 'concerns' are true to a much greater degree for all other economy, yet when it comes to crypto people are so giddy to pile on with their moral outrage based on their superstitions, I find it morally outrageous.

You would think they are but no, people actually believe in the nonsense that these token somehow store something of real value. You may have seen the BTC is a battery nonsense article. Same with this, some people think the token is somehow valuable because someone had to donate research to "generate it".

>So your main problem is with devs, the only ones who are actually doing work not just contributing machine work? Its actual programming sure, but it has no real use therefore no real market value. The whole system exists because it pays for itself. Its kinda like a fake financial perpetuum mobile that was started with a money printer, attracted a lot people and convinced them to gable. It now keeps going but it actually sucks money from outside in people just dont see it.

>All these 'concerns' are true to a much greater degree for all other economy, yet when it comes to crypto people are so giddy to pile on with their moral outrage based on their superstitions, I find it morally outrageous.

Well I hold crypto since 2013. I'm not against it at all. I also have no moral problem with people gambling. This is just a useless project. There are plenty more, in fact almost all of them are but the post is about this one coin so I gotta point out the nonsense of this one. And this one is hefty one because it doesn't even try to have a use-case.

I don't get it then, of course it has market value that is the 'issue'? Devs usually sell their work as premine, if they can that's the market value of their work thus far, right? I don't get what this project is doing wrong that wouldn't apply to all crypto, I think what it is doing right is making PoW into actually useful computation, which is great I hope we see much more of this, but not perhaps just for reasearch BOINC projects but also for cloud computing etc. thats where the real value of PoW imo is ...

Okay lets go with the premise that it does it wrong like all other crypto. Now what? Its still wrong? How is this even an argument? And more so how is it an pro argument? Its not less wrong or something its exactly the same wrong.

>I think what it is doing right is making PoW into actually useful computation...

PoW is used for decentral consensus. Its super bad at this but somewhat works anyway. FBA consensus does not need PoW so in general we dont need PoW for a bitcoin like system. FBA system exist since like 2013 or so. Using PoW for something good is still objective worse than not using PoW for the system at all. Else we could add some PoW to literally everything.

Now even worse than that is using PoS (objectively worse than FBA) and then add PoW/PoR for no reason at all (now you have gridcoin). It doesn't try to be a better bitcoin because if it would there would be no reason to add any kind of PoW since its not needed. The work/research is not used in the consensus mechanism at all. Its a PoS system with a PoW/R money printer attached.

The whole thing obviously doesn't come from bitcoin evolving somehow into something better. It comes form BOINIC devs jumping on the blockchain train because why not. It allowed them to print incentives at no cost to attach people to donate they CPU power. Its literally a money printer to attract donations its ridiculous. If you would say someone that they get a printed griddollar bill for every dollar donation people would laugh. But somehow if you add a bit blockchain flavor it fools people to do exactly that and worse people are even willing to buy the griddollar bill.

most of PoW is not used for consensus, but for distribution, to use PoS for consensus with PoW for distribution is exactly as ridiculus as PoW

Developers are not making any new Gridcoin. The only compensation the developers get is through transactions from the foundation address[1] which only gets and has gotten coins from 1) people sending coins to it and 2) the one time transaction for unconverted coins from Gridcoin-Classic in 2014 (which was not a good idea in my view, but it's too late to reverse that).

The research does bring value because people can like the idea of receiving something that came from the fruits of scientific work. That has some degree of value to people even if not literal value you can exchange for. Speculative prices exist as with many things, but that is not the main purpose nor should be the main purpose of Gridcoin. I'd agree that no one should be trying to enrich themselves in this because that's not what it's about

[1] https://gridcoin.us/wiki/foundation.html

It doesn't matter if they create new coins, they may use some bags that are already there that changes nothing at all. If it pays a dev it will be sold so the dev was paid by previously printed coins and the circulation supply will be inflated.

>The research does bring value because people can like the idea of receiving something that came from the fruits of scientific work.

Thats a nice fairy tale but no, the research adds absolutely no value to the token.

The devs have mostly not sold coins. See for instance one of the core devs, Jim Owens, who still has over a million Gridcoin and continues to run BOINC and earn more from even just that (and has been running BOINC since BOINC started over 18 years ago).

> That's a nice fairy tale but no, the research adds absolutely no value to the token.

Maybe this doesn't make you value it any more personally, but that doesn't mean others don't. Where things come from make a big difference in value of a thing. A famous artist making a painting and someone less known making the same painting will be valued quite differently by people. As well some people value (not talking about price) PoW cryptos less (or even negatively) because of environmental concerns stemming from where the new coins come from. Even just not having the negatives from concerns of energy going to useless work makes its value different

I think this is conversation about value is going to go in circles, so I think we can agree to disagree on this

You just proof my point. the se is a dev with somehow holds a significant amount of the coins. the fact that he has not sold them means nothing maybe he sold some maybe he sold other coins you didnt knew they where his too. maybe hes just one of the gamblers that hope on higer prices. it all doesnt matter. if he got them for any kind of work then the system printed money to pay for the work therefore it runs on inflation therefore he was paid with the value that was or will be removed form everyone else who holds the coin.

>I think this is conversation about value is going to go in circles...

I dont think so... you bough no argument at all. The fact that some people somehow see vale in the token is at best anecdotal at worst its just proof of stupid people. It doesn't actually proof that it add value. Its like people who say something that is unique and therefore can not be replaced must be valuable in fact its value would need to be infinite. Its a nice mind game but it's wrong. Scarcity/uniqueness does not create value.

I assume the tech behind this is brittle in that Proof of Research "miners" are assumed to be trusted in that they don't just lie to the BOINC servers about what work they actually performed.

The BOINC projects run checks on the work a user submit. Usually it involves sending out the same work to two random different people and seeing if they match

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

If someone has the level of processing power to get a majority of a project's tasks, I think it would go very quickly noticed, and the project admin can just up their task validation higher making it much harder (e.g send to 4 random clients instead of 2). If they were to try to abort a bunch of the work, it would almost certainly get detected automatically by the project's spam protections and they would get less work sent to the point of no work if they do it too much. As well you'd have to pick only a single project which only accounts for 1/19th (currently) of Gridcoin research rewards. Seems easier to just do things legitimately if you have that level of power

The main way you could really pull anything like that off is through a bugs or miss-configurations on where work is sent, which did happen once on a single project that messed up how work was sent, but was fixed rather quickly before they ever got any Gridcoin. As well, Gridcoin incentivizes people to look out for it since they are competing against any cheaters. If a project didn't respond to any attempts to do this, they can also be removed from the whitelisted projects on Gridcoin if needed

For some comparison points about the level of power you'd need without any bugs, Rosetta@Home has 327,525 tasks currently running in place with an estimated ~370 terraflops of power[1]. Now Rosetta@Home is one of the more competitive projects due interest in their COVID-19 work, but overall there's still a lot of computing power in BOINC and from people earning Gridcoin for running BOINC.

I believe there's more to the verification system, but my that's current understanding of it.

[1] https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/server_status.php

> If someone has the level of processing power to get a majority of a project's tasks

But you don't need a lot of processing power to do a sibyl attack, if you're actually not running the tasks.

I also realized that I should have mention that I'm not sure you could always identify which tasks were the checks you were looking for

For that scenario you mentioned, you'd not get any more tasks, as projects have limits on how many tasks they send out to people with tasks in progress. If you tried to spoof a bunch of hosts, they would see a very suspicious account that has a ton of tasks in progress but almost none completed. If you were spoofing users, I think the project would notice that half of their tasks are running way longer than normal all of a sudden or at least creeping that way if done slowly. Projects could make the tasks deadlines tighter and then make it harder for someone to try to hoard tasks. As well if you were running in virtual machines or something like that, they could tell that suddenly they have way more VMs "running" tasks and limit and even abort tasks just for those. If you try to spoof as a real machine, then you can look at IP addresses, etc. Having to do all that ends up taking more and more work try to do. If you have actual hardware running it, well that's fairy similar to having a large amount of processing power, and they could still limit the deadlines and all. You'd still have to compete against the other tens of thousands of users getting tasks on the project meaning that the project would have to see a massive increase in hosts and users on the project.

As well, if you were trying to earn Gridcoin for all that and were spoofing users, you'd also have to be creating tens of thousands of beacons (tie BOINC accounts to Gridcoin rewards) which need for each user which cost 0.5 GRC each plus transaction fees, and those beacons take some time to verify which would give the projects a chance to stop it if they see it before you ever got any Gridcoin. You'd also have to stake on each account which would take a while and likely require a really really high balance to try to pull anything like that off and earn much

Lastly some project have a literal either a very high number or some cases an infinite amount of tasks possible like some of the mathematical projects, so most of your tasks would not be the checks you'd be hoping to have

The economics of the coin address this. It's a fairly complex system. Lots of issues but solid progress due to some recent devs and contributors.

Additionally contributions toward BOINC are not used to secure the ledger due to the security hole you point out but again look at the economics to learn more. Proof of Research is not a real thing.

Ah yeah I should have mentioned that its PoS and that PoR is not really a thing anymore[1]. It's proof of stake that makes the actual blocks. The research rewards are just added on top of staking. Even all the project just suddenly shut down or something crazy like that, the network would keep on going just on Proof of Stake

[1] It was around for some time technically alongside PoS, but this was removed over 4 years ago. Not sure how long it was a thing since I was just learning about Gridcoin when it was removed

When I first heard of Bitcoin like ten years ago, I thought it worked like Gridcoin - that the computation was something useful and the coin a sort of virtual reward. Oh well.

All articles about crypto should be banned on HN unless the author posts about any position they have in the coin. Influencers have to acknowledge when they’re promoting a product, it should be the same for all crypto.

Jump on the musical chairs scam and see if you make some money. Either way the crim posting this article is going to make money

Should it be the same for articles about tech companies? Or about the economy in general if you own some index ETF?

In the article he's explicitly talking about an "investment thesis".

If I wrote articles like below I should explicitly state my investment.

"Why gold is a great investment"

"Why You should invest in Tesla"

"The Ark Space Exploration & Innovation ETF (NYSE: ARKX) is the future"

If your objective is to get your readers to do something that could financially benefit you then you should make that clear.

I noticed that some financial podcasts even have a disclaimer at the start of their podcast.

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Sorry I should have clarified in my original comment and said all articles shilling some coin

Gridcoin and PowerLedger two of my favorite crypto projects as there is a tangible benefit to both (IMHO).

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