roboticmind

This is a false dichotomy. Plenty of people do whole foods plant-based diets without those. Additionally, it's also often replacing highly processed meats

> There is not one shed of science that can suggest with any amount of confidence that eliminating livestock will make a difference with global warming meaningful enough to justify not being able to eat the food that we developed to subsist on.

As long as that gas continues to go into the atmosphere, it's going to keep causing problems for climate change. It accounts for 14.5% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions[1] and a phase out presents a massive opportunity to sequester carbon.

> We show that, even in the absence of any other emission reductions, persistent drops in atmospheric methane and nitrous oxide levels, and slower carbon dioxide accumulation, following a phaseout of livestock production would, through the end of the century, have the same cumulative effect on the warming potential of the atmosphere as a 25 gigaton per year reduction in anthropogenic CO2 emissions, providing half of the net emission reductions necessary to limit warming to 2°C. The magnitude and rapidity of these potential effects should place the reduction or elimination of animal agriculture at the forefront of strategies for averting disastrous climate change.

https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/07/20-meat-...

If you keep emitting that methane, then it continues to persist and leads to problems with climate change. Unfortunately this can only reduced a bit with changes to farming practices in the meat industry

> people that argue that we should stop eating meat simply reveal themselves as regressives (hating advanced human civilisation, wanting a decrease in energy usage of humanity, which necessarily implies regression and mass death).

How does saying the meat industry is a problem "hating human civilization"? It certainly does not mean regression and mass death as it would decrease the amount of land, cropland, and resources to grow food since we wouldn't need to grow so much feed nor clear so much land for pastures

"If we would shift towards a more plant-based diet we don’t only need less agricultural land overall, we also need less cropland"

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

It is worth noting that this doesn't just look at things in the 90's, but goes all the way out to 2011

Worth pointing out that the energy may matter more on a per mass basis than strictly per volume in some applications. By looking at MJ/kg, Hydrogen even beats out gasoline[1] although that's not the case for per unit volume[2]

Special storage requirements are certainly something to considering especially with high pressures typically involved for gas storage or cryogenic temperatures for liquid. Although it's not as though other fuels have no special storage requirements - it's just that we're used to their complexities

[1] 120 MJ/kg for hydrogen versus 44 MJ/kg for gasoline https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-storage

[2] 8 MJ/L for hydrogen vs 32 MJ/L for gasoline

I think for cars that's probably the case, but that might be too focused on cars.

A possible future for it might be for large planes, boats, etc. that would really need the higher energy density of hydrogen vs batteries. The inefficiency is of course not going to be great, but it means those could possibly use renewable sources (depending on hydrogen production). Or maybe some major battery advancements come before that and make energy density less of an issue ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Firefox has this too. You can do it the network tab[1] or in the Responsive Design Mode[2]. There's drop downs there where you can control how much you want to throttle

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Network_Monit...'

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Responsive_De...

I assume they are saying that because you wouldn't want something where someone could do a MITM and insert arbitrary bash commands through $() or other similar things

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

I'm not sure that the second option is a very pythonic way to do it, but that's subjective of course. I'd imagine the original commenter views using a lot of ifs and elifs as the pythonic way to do it

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

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.

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

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

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

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...

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

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 :)

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

Since I last used it, it looks like there has been a lot of work on manim in the community fork [1]. It used to definitely be a fair amount of work to figure things out, but it looks like things are easier now. I remember having to dig through source code for everything and the SVG rendering was a nightmare, but since then there's now some proper documentation [2] and an overhaul of how manim does SVG rendering [3]. Looks like it's much nicer to use now. It's worth messing around with if you haven't used manim before

[1] https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim/

[2] https://docs.manim.community/en/v0.4.0/index.html

[3] https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim/pull/915

I just want to note that I meant originally for the 5.0.0 work the developers didn't request compensation, and so it hasn't been sent just yet since it the request was recent. It has nothing to do with being paid in Gridcoin or not.

> Its useless development paid by useless coins for the sake of making the useless coins spendable to pay for the useless development. A self-feeding nonsense system that happens to produce software that no one would actually want to pay for.

It's community run. There isn't really a "they" deciding anything or paying for things. It's not paid for so much as compensated. Some people have done work on it without requesting any compensation. I think you think there is a more formal system in place here than there is. The only reason there is a bunch of Gridcoin lying around in that foundation address for this is because of the transition from Gridcoin-Classic to modern Gridcoin [1] which arguably probably shouldn't have been done the way it was, but it's too late for anyone to reverse that decision from 2014.

As with the other thread, I don't think continuing this thread will be lead to very much either.

Lastly, I just want to note that for me, the reason that some of this doesn't matter as much to me personally (not that it doesn't matter at all) is because I view Gridcoin more as an addition to the science. If Gridcoin collapsed and went to zero, I still would have done something useful with my machines and helped science. I can't say that about many other coins.

[1] https://gridcoin.us/wiki/gridcoin-classic

Maybe backed was a bad word to use. I more just meant that it's creation is linked with scientific work having been done. That it has a value linked to helping science - not a direct one to one thing you can exchange for helping science. More so that accepting it means that you know that part of it came from helping science

> If you calculate the larges know prime number that number does in no way have or hold the value of work you put in to get it. the number is in fact worthless once it is known.

None of the projects on Gridcoin are currently for finding Prime numbers. There was one in the past, but it was removed from the whitelist per the admin's request. I also disagree with the notion prime numbers they are worthless once they are known, but I'm not going to go into that because it's not relevant here

With Gridcoin the work is meaningful after it has been done. Take for instance the biomedical research done by a bunch of projects. The proteins and the drugs they help lead to have massive impacts to a lot of people. Now it isn't something you can exchange back and forth through time obviously, but its result is something you can still see is meaningful

> literally donation by inflation

I didn't say it wasn't from inflation, but it's opposed to many making no donations at all and there still being the same amount of inflation. It's used a lot because it's convenient to setup and it doesn't result in any extra transaction fees or the like. The alternative in other coins is that people just don't end up sending anything more and just take all of the newly minted coins

> should be called stimulus lol

:/

not going to go into this

I think continuing this conversation is not going to really result in much. I'm not sure what exactly you are looking for that you see in other cryptocurrencies. I think this is going keep going in circles.

> 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

That's correct that the requirement to be on team Gridcoin was removed in 5.0.0. You can now earn Gridcoin from any BOINC team.

The manual rewards claim is still in the works although there's now some more specific plans in mind [1] for it than there were in the past. It's on the roadmap somewhere

[1] See this message from Jim Owens (one of the core developers) about some of what he's thinking https://discord.com/channels/211637812968161280/338020950714.... I would normally quote this instead of making you have to join a Discord, but it's rather lengthy and part of a discussion

Ah that makes more sense

I see using it a currency backed by scientific work is already something that makes using it unique and can make people interested in accepting it and use it. I see that you don't view it the same way, but that's okay too

As well, here's one thing that may or may not usecase per se, but it is something a that's different from most cryptos in use of the coin itself. It's nice feature that only a one or maybe a handful other coins [1] called sidestaking. With it you can send any % of your staking rewards to other addresses in the coinbase transaction. So you could for instance use it to donate to BOINC projects that accept Gridcoin every time you stake (and people already do that). Or you could send it to a friend when you stake or anyone really. You can send to multiple addresses every time you stake with different % for each (up to 6 before it has to cycle through them on each stake) to. On the flip side, accepting Gridcoin means you can also accept sidestakes (at least for things like donations)

[1] Pinkcoin is the only other one I know of and could find (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTuM69Lgd5o). Looking it up just brings me mostly to Gridcoin stuff

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

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

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/comments/im8ktw/gridcoin_5...

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 lurking for a few months and I notice that you have changed some links in the past. Not sure what the guidelines are for changing links, so let me know if me that's not something you think is needed or can do

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