[HN Gopher] Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards...
___________________________________________________________________
Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer
computing
Author : guerrilla
Score : 192 points
Date : 2021-02-23 12:04 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| Kiro wrote:
| How is it verified? I thought the problem with doing useful work
| instead of normal PoW was that producing and verifying are
| equally hard, while Bitcoin's PoW scheme is hard to produce but
| easy to verify (so other miners can easily see that you've
| actually found the hash without doing any computations
| themselves).
| Forbo wrote:
| Even if you have people doubling or tripling up the work on
| something useful, the end result is infinitely more useful than
| bruteforced hashes.
| dnautics wrote:
| Don't forget that the usefulness of brute forced hashes _is_
| that it lets you have decentralized trust, so, you may be off
| by a factor of infinity.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Decentralized trust on Bitcoin is an illusion in
| practicality. There are trust bottlenecks all over the
| place when most people go to use it.
|
| It's ultimately a quixotic goal. So compromising a bit on
| mathematical decentralized trustlessness to accomplish some
| of the other goals of cryptocurrency while addressing the
| massive waste is a valid goal IMHO.
| [deleted]
| Tentom wrote:
| It uses Proof-of-stake and not Proof-of-work to secure the
| block chain.
|
| Additionally it has a Proof-Of-Research layer on top that
| reward the scientific research processing.
|
| Each whitelisted project gets its chare of a set amount of
| Gridcoins that in minted and distributed to the individual
| contributors. The amount is currently distributed equally
| across whitelisted project. So more project the less will be
| given to a potentially fraudulent project.
|
| How each project verify the tasks is more or less up to the
| project to handle. The individual Boinc project has incentives
| to do this as they use the result in their scientific report
| (falls result will be bad for them).
|
| One solution to this problem is to have multiple crunchers do
| the same task and compare results, if the tasks is distributed
| randomly then an increase in the number of equal tasks can be
| used to increase confidence in the result. Eg a monte carlo
| simulation can be bone multiple times and the result can be
| compared, if it is within a given threshold. (this part is the
| responsibility of the individual project)
|
| Other tasks might have hard to compute result that are easy to
| verify for the host similar to Prof-Of-Work on other
| blockchains.
|
| More Boinc project will help to decentralize the reward, limit
| the risk of running out of research to do, and if one malicious
| project by chance get whitelisted then the impact will be
| limited.
|
| The contributors contribution to each project is gathers by
| Oracles that compares their findings and this result is
| committed to the superblock.
| neolefty wrote:
| It depends on out-of-loop review of the oracles by people, to
| ensure they stay honest, and that new oracles are honest.
|
| Over time, as problems come and go, I assume oracles will be
| added and retired, so this coin will require manual
| maintenance. A necessary cost of being interesting?
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Folding can be and is verified, however.
| hakesdev wrote:
| If you use a money with an issuance scheme that doesn't derive
| from pure costs (useless things like hashing), the underlying
| incentives of that money will seed its own destruction.
|
| What happens if you have a coin based on "useful work" and you
| "solve" the problem you were hoping to solve. Now a lot of
| "miners" leave the network, presumably because they were only
| there to help solve that particular problem. Now you have a weak
| system, and a system subject to 51% attacks by adversarial
| miners, and therefore not a good money/coin.
|
| I don't see how HN commenters (in large part) don't get this.
| It's the Single-responsibility Principle, just in a different
| context.
| j-pb wrote:
| There's plenty of usefull work that we won't run out of.
|
| SAT solving is the prime candidate, because we have A LOT of NP
| hard problems in our day to day lives.
|
| Weather simulations are another one, drug research is another
| one.
|
| For the latter I'd argue that if we're at a point where we've
| erredicated all disease, we've also transcended as a society to
| a point where money has become obsolete.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| Yeah, just last night I was curious about any blockchain
| approaches that might be out there that try and do something
| more useful and found people trying to use SAT solving as the
| base. This paper in particular seemed pretty interesting and
| I do hope we get to a place where we can at least be working
| on NP hard problems while transacting on a blockchain:
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3297280.3297319
| VMG wrote:
| This is besides the point, and the parent didn't quite
| explain it correctly.
|
| If there is no opportunity cost for mining, there is no
| penalty for mining an invalid chain therefore no security.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| There is a penalty for producing an invalid fold. Folds are
| validated.
| VMG wrote:
| A miner can secretly build a blockchain that reverses
| transactions with little cost. He'll still get rewarded
| for correct protein folding.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| A penalty mechanism is possible that disincentives such
| behavior and makes it impractical. Filecoin has such a
| system. But a powerful enough mining pool (China has 65%
| of mining power) can also do this for Bitcoin.
| wyldfire wrote:
| I understand that the desire for a Proof of Work to be
| useful is strong and that's what is the appeal for these
| kinds of things. You should know that everyone would be
| totally onboard if there were a way to keep critical
| cryptocoin properties _AND_ make the computation useful.
| The naysayers here don 't dislike folding or any other
| useful computations. They just have experience with the
| cryptocoin design elements.
|
| There's some subtleties to how a cryptocoin works that
| aren't obvious and they're absolutely critical to making
| it work. Bitcoin can have competing chains of blocks that
| eventually get orphaned. And it's because there's this
| race condition while block solutions are propagated
| across the network. Eventually, after enough blocks the
| network agrees on which chain wins. But imagine if you
| could know how the next block would start - what its
| inputs would be. You could start solving that block now.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| That would only help you if you had a novel, valid
| folding solution.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Can you explain this in more detail or point me to
| something that does?
| coinward wrote:
| Satoshi was correct to assume that the most useful work is
| securing the network
| dang wrote:
| 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)
|
| _BOINC: Compute for Science_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10205904 - Sept 2015 (11
| comments)
|
| _Help advance science while mining cryptocurrency_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8102623 - July 2014 (1
| comment)
| roboticmind wrote:
| 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
| RankingMember wrote:
| Does anyone still own this? It came out awhile back and Bittrex
| dropped it in like 2018.
| lolIamANoob wrote:
| A lot of people are still running BOINC and getting Gridcoins
| in return. The difficulty of staking has increased a lot since
| 2018.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Whenever a new coin shows up, the only interesting question is
| whether it's a scam, a joke, or an earnest yet ridiculous attempt
| to solve a problem that blockchains in no way solve.
| Forbo wrote:
| New? Gridcoin has been around since 2013.
| jl2718 wrote:
| 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 PoW. The
| solution to a puzzle is meaningless if the same solution can be
| shown as the result of two different inputs. So the puzzle must
| be practically unique to each proposed block (infinite
| possibilities), and 'fair' to each proposal. If you can find a
| useful puzzle with these properties, please don't hold back.
| Moodles wrote:
| I once saw another example coin like this where the "useful
| PoW" was finding chains of prime numbers or something. However,
| PoW solutions were not dependent on the current blockchain
| sate, which rendered it insecure as someone could just
| stockpile solutions and then hijack the blockchain. Is it the
| case here too?
|
| The closest I've seen to a useful PoW coin is one which relied
| in intel SGX to prove that the work done was useful and honest,
| but of course the central root of trust is really Intel's SGX
| in that case.
| DavidHilbert wrote:
| > The solution to a puzzle is meaningless if the same solution
| can be shown as the result of two different inputs.
|
| This isn't true. There are an infinite number of inputs that
| result in the same solution for bitcoin (or any hash)
| jl2718 wrote:
| Okay let's see an example. ;)
| powerbutton65 wrote:
| Like it or not they are technically correct. SHA-256 is a
| one way compression and furthermore the PoW for bitcoin
| doesn't require a match for the entire hash.
|
| There's loads of examples of this in the bitcoin network
| whenever there's been a fork and eventually orphaned
| blocks.
| jl2718 wrote:
| Those are different solutions to the puzzle. Nobody has
| ever published a sha-256 hash collision. It has happened
| once with sha-1.
| neolefty wrote:
| The principles are the same -- it's just harder to find
| collisions for larger digest sizes. (Although bugs in
| sha-1 add an interesting wrinkle to the discussion.)
|
| In fact one could argue that encryption without requiring
| infinite bandwidth or computation requires finite
| difficulty in math puzzles.
|
| So our current approach to encryption is fundamentally
| vulnerable to (vastly) more powerful adversary computers.
| Only things like quantum cryptography break free of that
| limitation, by changing the ground rules.
| jl2718 wrote:
| Algorithmic cryptography depends on a computation time
| approaching infinity for perfect security. Quantum
| cryptography depends on a data transmission rate
| approaching zero for perfect security. Either way,
| perfect security takes forever.
| Moodles wrote:
| Right, but that's a little unfair? SHA-256 is literally a
| function designed to make it impossible to find such
| collisions. BIONIC problems aren't designed with that in
| mind.
| fogof wrote:
| 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.
| bowmessage wrote:
| 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.
| fogof wrote:
| This is a good point. I was assuming that computing a
| protein fold was something that could be done relatively
| quickly, but it seems like these simulations are actually
| much more computationally intensive than that.
|
| This is obviously not my area of expertise, but I wonder if
| there is any way to make more efficient but still useful
| computational questions about protein folding. For example,
| if we try to fold just part of a protein (only 100 or so
| amino acids, say) and do it at a much lower fidelity of
| simulation, is the result still helpful?
| dfgdghdf wrote:
| Exactly this. The PoW scheme must commit you to a particular
| chain.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Can you just hash a new solution to the puzzle with the new
| proposed block?
| proto-n wrote:
| Solution has to depend on the proposed block, so that a
| solution is not reusable for the next block
| Robotbeat wrote:
| The solution is also announced in cleartext, so you can
| check against previous solutions.
| AgentME wrote:
| 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.
| roboticmind wrote:
| 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 :)
| jl2718 wrote:
| 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.
| roboticmind wrote:
| 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
| lappa wrote:
| 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?
| vmception wrote:
| 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
| roboticmind wrote:
| 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)
| stonesweep wrote:
| I tried out Gridcoin a few years back in it's $0.05 days, its at
| ~$0.01 now - at the time you had to "buy in" about $100 USD to
| have enough collateral to work solo (stake to get credit
| rewards), otherwise you had to join a mining pool to just get
| paid your meager credits. A basic $5 cloud server cannot generate
| enough GRC credit to pay for itself at 5 cents.
| gruez wrote:
| >A basic $5 cloud server cannot generate enough GRC credit to
| pay for itself at 5 cents.
|
| This is totally expected because of how the economics of mining
| works. If it were profitable to mine with a $5 cloud server
| then everybody would jump on, difficulty would increase, and it
| wouldn't be profitable anymore. The miners you're competing
| against are hobbyists with much cheaper access to compute than
| you, eg. they've already bought a threadripper workstation for
| work related purposes and they're just using the spare cycles.
| stonesweep wrote:
| > _profitable_
|
| ...I 'd settle for "break even" and have it simply pay for
| itself to perform the scientific work. My personal choice is
| to participate in the World Community Grid and I tried
| everything from a cloud server to a 20-core dual E5-2660v2
| (rented) and even that amount of power cannot pay for it's
| monthly (super cheap, $75) rental fees. A laptop with an
| i5-3320 (something like that) cannot even pay for it's
| electricity use generating GRC.
|
| Not profitable, just break even - that's all a guy like me
| asks for; it's more efficient if I take cold hard cash and
| donate it to a comparable cause than it does to run WCG nodes
| and expect GRC to just cover the electricity cost, ignore the
| hardware. I don't want to be profitable, just have any rig
| pay for it's electricity use - that's it. GRC cannot even
| cover that spread in finances.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > profitable
|
| Similar to what stonesweep said, some people have different
| economics. For example, I have an old computer sitting
| around. And my home heats by electricity in the winter.
| Therefore any time I need to heat my home it's 0 marginal
| cost to instead do mining (of any kind). IMO this is the real
| future of green efficiency, finding the places where the
| energy was already "spent" on a high value task, and add a
| low value task in the chain. Another example could be server
| farms could water cool and use waste heat for elec
| generation, low temp plastic melting, or residential hot
| water...
| david_draco wrote:
| How can regulations can make alternative, less climate-harming
| projects such as this more attractive over bitcoin? Would crypto-
| currency income taxes or perhaps data center laws (similar to
| cyber-crime laws) be a useful tool? Or would that only favor
| lightning networks/PoS and those not declaring earnings.
| neolefty wrote:
| This is an excellent point IMO. Unregulated central
| institutions (such as currency) lead to anarchy, in which
| public interest is not aligned with benefits. For example, pure
| Bitcoin serves only Bitcoin, with disregard for laws about,
| say, money laundering. If you can find a way to make it work
| for you, great -- but that will only align with the public good
| by chance.
|
| GridCoin seems like an attempt to mitigate that with internal
| regulation -- it seems like the assumption is that GridCoin
| commits to proof-of-work tasks that are publicly beneficial.
| keymone wrote:
| Your aim is off, bitcoin using energy is fine just like any
| other use of energy is fine, part of the free market of ebergy.
| It's production of energy from fossil fuels that isn't fine.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I don't think that's really true. There are plenty of cases
| where we can decide collectively as a society that a thing is
| valuable or not-valuable and intentionally set a particular
| price for it. As an obvious example, no one would argue that
| hospitals in Texas should have been paying the "market rate"
| for electricity last week, and conversely, it would have been
| a scandal if someone had been mining bitcoin on the Texas
| grid, no matter what price they were paying per kWh.
|
| A similar thing happens with water, where people are asked
| not to use their sprinklers during a dry spell. They can
| _afford_ to buy a lot of water at the market rate, and
| raising the price might not even change that (besides being
| super unfair to someone else who then might struggle to
| afford even enough water to drink).
|
| So yeah, I think it's fair for us to say as a society that
| turning electricity into heat in the form of bitcoin mining
| is a gigantic and unacceptable waste of a resource that we'd
| like to use for other things.
| beiller wrote:
| > turning electricity into heat in the form of bitcoin
| mining is a gigantic and unacceptable waste of a resource
| that we'd like to use for other things
|
| Hi I live in a cold place! Interestingly, bitcoin mining is
| an electric space heater with 100% efficiency. I could
| theoretically heat my home. Currently I use natural gas
| (which emits CO2 aka a greenhouse gas). The furnace runs at
| 95% efficiency I think. If my electricity can be generated
| with less CO2 emissions than my furnace via nuclear, solar,
| wind, then it would be quite desirable wouldn't it? Would
| it be fair to say electric heaters are a giant unacceptable
| waste of compute?
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > Interestingly, bitcoin mining is an electric space
| heater with 100% efficiency.
|
| Technically you can get greater than 100% with electric
| heat pumps. But you're correct if you're marginally
| comparing just a space heater with/or without a CPU
| inside it.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| A fair point, but in reality almost all of the Bitcoin
| heat is vented to the environment-- no one is seriously
| capturing it for reuse at this point.
|
| Also important to note that resistance heating ("100%")
| is in fact _not_ the most efficient way to use
| electricity for warming a space. The most efficient is
| with a heat pump, where you 're actually moving the heat
| from outside to inside.
| keymone wrote:
| > we can decide collectively as a society that a thing is
| valuable or not-valuable and intentionally set a particular
| price for it
|
| yeah, that's exactly what's happening to bitcoin for last
| 10 years.
|
| > turning electricity into heat in the form of bitcoin
| mining is a gigantic and unacceptable waste of a resource
| that we'd like to use for other things
|
| first of all, heat is a sign of inefficiency, the better
| bitcoin mining gets the less heat it will produce. second -
| it's a gigantic and unacceptable waste of resources _in
| your opinion_ , personally i very much disagree and think
| the opposite: decentralized financial security expressed
| directly in terms of energy required to subvert it is the
| largest discovery in financial theory since the concept of
| money itself, it is extremely valuable.
| jMyles wrote:
| We need to stop trying to shoehorn the state into places where
| it doesn't fit or belong.
| david_draco wrote:
| Regulation worked for the ozone hole and river pollution.
| Nothing else did.
| jMyles wrote:
| So let's crack the fuck down on externalities of power
| generation and consumption. Ban fossil fuels on an
| aggressive timeframe. Make car-free cities everywhere. Stop
| all wars right now today.
|
| But those things are orthogonal (and not even adjacent) to
| selecting an algorithm for PoW consensus.
|
| I also want to caution against circlejerking over clean
| water and ozone restoration. Things on a global scale are
| still pretty dire; the solution is ahead of us, not behind,
| and it's not clear what it will be.
| istjohn wrote:
| I can't think of anythink more suitable for state
| intervention than solving the coordination problem to ensure
| the continued habitability of planet Earth.
| jMyles wrote:
| Oh heck yeah. Climate justice is the issue of our age. I'm
| not saying not to take it seriously (few are anymore,
| right?).
|
| However, choosing a PoW algorithm is unrelated to this task
| (and also risks giving cosmetic satisfaction while solving
| nothing).
|
| Continued habitability of planet Earth is made dramatically
| more likely by supplanting monetary systems which:
|
| * encourage people to treat money like a hot potato, better
| swapped for cheap plastic crap
|
| * Make wars (the absolutely King Kong of carbon emission
| among human activities) much less expensive at the margins
| by slushily funding industrial complexes.
| NonCoder wrote:
| This is one of my favorite cryptocurrencies. The process of
| solving a real world problem is very useful in the long run.
| Forbo wrote:
| I've been trying to bring attention to this project for years. It
| directly addresses the whole "proof of work is proof of waste"
| problem. Some of my earliest submissions to HN were about
| GridCoin, and they largely went compeletely ignored, glad to
| finally see it on the front page. At least with BOINC you end up
| with something more worthwhile than just bruteforcing hashes.
| hakesdev wrote:
| If you use a money with an issuance scheme that doesn't derive
| from pure costs (useless things like hashing), the underlying
| incentives of that money will seed its own destruction.
|
| What happens if you have a coin based on "useful work" and you
| "solve" the problem you were hoping to solve. Now a lot of
| "miners" leave the network, presumably because they were only
| there to help solve that particular problem. Now you have a
| weak system, and a system subject to 51% attacks by adversarial
| miners, and therefore not a good money/coin.
|
| I don't see how HN commenters (in large part) don't get this.
| It's the Single-responsibility Principle, just in a different
| context.
| Forbo wrote:
| Considering the number of supercomputers that have been
| constructed since the days of ENIAC, I don't think we'll be
| running out of scientific computing problems any time soon.
| And if we somehow do manage to run out of computing problems,
| then I guess we've already succeeded.
| zekrioca wrote:
| I'm wondering why you think supercomputers are actually
| built for. Besides that, the type of computational problems
| that are submitted to and that BOINC helps solving are
| different to those that a supercomputer solves. The former
| (known as High Throughput Computing, HTC) is concerned
| mainly -- as the name suggests -- with throughput, while
| the latter (High Performance Computing, HPC) with
| speed/latency.
|
| There is a reason why Cloud providers do not yet have
| "real" HPC offerings (i.e., performance-wise), even though
| with all the marketing they do to appear otherwise..
| fsflover wrote:
| But can you change the task underlying your cryptocurrency
| without breaking the network?
| ilammy wrote:
| If the network has been designed for this in the first
| place - why shouldn't you be able to?
|
| With Gridcoin you can participate in a number of eligible
| BOINC projects [1] and get rewards for computing on any
| of them. The network can add or remove projects.
|
| [1]: https://gridcoin.ddns.net/pages/project-list.php
| 3np wrote:
| Same, I even bought some back in... 2014 I think?
|
| I'm yet ambivalent on if it's a factor on why it hasn't been
| able to attract serious attention, but I've heard the argument
| that doing calculations that have external value outside of PoW
| breaks the incentive mechanisms.
|
| To me, merge mining on Bitcoin[0] and MEV on Ethereum[1] are
| evidence against that argument, since we already have those
| forces in play today. So Gridcoins concept should work.
|
| [0]: https://blog.bitmex.com/the-growth-of-bitcoin-merge-
| mining/
|
| [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.05234
| bunkydoo wrote:
| Well, one area that Gridcoin isn't / hasn't been availed for is
| the fact that it (like folding@home) has projects that helped do
| research on COVID. Although folding@home didn't provide any
| monetary reward - at least Rosetta@home is a supported GRC
| project. Obviously the token price would need to be higher to
| make the break even cost of the servers & mining feasible, but it
| is a neat project.
| jaxslayerv wrote:
| https://birdtraps.com.ng/
| wyldfire wrote:
| For most cryptocoins, you want a proof-of-work to be: (1) easy
| for a computer to verify, (2) hard for a computer to perform, (3)
| impossible to predict for a given 'block' and (4) decentralized
| and untrusted.
|
| If it's a novel scientific problem it won't be all of these. An
| interesting exception is prime numbers. Primecoin [1] has a
| useful proof-of-work: it finds Cunningham chains of primes.
|
| If you don't like the energy consumed by a proof of work, you
| should probably use something else like proof of stake. Any
| clever idea to try and steer the computational power to SETI@home
| or protein folding won't have the critical qualities of most
| cryptocoins.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin
| noxer wrote:
| Instead of PoS there are FBA (federated byzantine agreement)
| chains who are older than PoS thus better tested and arguably
| without any of the flaws PoS has. PoS is really a step backward
| and not the real successor to PoW.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Folding can be verified easier than it can be produced.
| jl2718 wrote:
| I spoke briefly with Vijay Pande about this in 2011. Folding
| does have a lot of the right properties for a good proof-of-
| work system, the main exception being that the solution must
| be unique to the input. It may be possible to achieve this by
| embedding information into sets of constraints, as long as
| any particular set of constraints can be shown to be
| isoenergetic. Or perhaps by expanding the problem by adding
| more atoms in a way that embeds information about the inputs.
| Also, the solutions would be quite large. But I think he was
| more interested with my experience writing molecular dynamics
| code than blockchain, and rescinded the RA offer after this
| conversation, so I haven't thought about it much since then.
|
| Reconsidering (briefly) now, I think it can be done.
| tromp wrote:
| You can verify that some fold achieves some energy state.
| What you cannot efficiently verify is that it's the best
| possible fold, achieving the global minimum energy.
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| > You can verify that some fold achieves some energy state.
|
| IMO, that makes it similar to Difficulty[1] (and the
| related target) in Bitcoin's POW scheme.
|
| [1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty
| tromp wrote:
| except that with difficulty, you know the expected effort
| needed to pass the threshold. with folding of arbitrary
| proteins, you have no idea.
| wyldfire wrote:
| There's no points for partial credit. It cannot be
| decentralized, untrusted and unpredictable. If anything other
| than an automaton produces the PoW inputs, it's at least
| centralized and we must trust that no one is cheating the
| PoW.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| No points for partial credit?? Well... if you believe that,
| then that makes Bitcoin suspect as well as its consensus
| mechanism is essentially already broken by the practical
| concentration of mining power in a single country with an
| authoritarian central government.
|
| EDIT: Anyone using an online wallet is already compromising
| trustlessness. Heck, using common software packages that
| you didn't personally inspect is also compromising
| trustlessness. But does this matter in practicality? Yes
| (such online wallets and even sometimes soft wallets have
| been compromised or have lost coins occasionally), but not
| enough to necessarily get rid of all of the utility of
| cryptocurrency.
| deeeeplearning wrote:
| Not to be that guy but did anyone read the 2 sentence wiki?
|
| "Gridcoin attempts to address and ease the environmental energy
| impact of cryptocurrency mining through its proof-of-research and
| proof-of-stake protocols"
|
| Feels like a quarter of the comments are complaining about PoW
| ...
| jl2718 wrote:
| Because it doesn't 'address' any of that. It' vanilla PoS.
| Still a good idea for other reasons.
| CodinM wrote:
| I actually emailed someone at BOINC in July 2015 regarding
| exactly this, I see the paper came out in December 2015 with the
| idea. Glad to see it finally becoming a reality.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Gridcoin was launched on October 16, 2013
| https://gridcoin.us/wiki/
| VMG wrote:
| Proof-of-Work only makes sense if there is an opportunity cost
| for mining an invalid chain.
|
| If mining an invalid chain is "useful" in some way, the security
| guarantee disappears.
| algo646464 wrote:
| Can you explain why the security guarantee disappears in more
| detail?
|
| I thought that the security of a block-chain comes primarily
| from the difficulty of rewriting the chain of blocks. To do
| that you will have to fork and recompute the chain from some
| point back in history (say 5 blocks ago). This puts at a
| disadvantage since the rest of the network is ahead of you by 5
| blocks and will continue adding new blocks. So you will need a
| lot of computational power to rewrite history and also overtake
| the rest of the network.
|
| Why would some additional reward for mining (by solving a
| useful problem) break this?
| VMG wrote:
| You don't actually need 51% of the mining power to perform a
| double-spend attack. Just by pure chance, even with 10% of
| the mining power, you will find 5 blocks in a row sometimes.
|
| With a "wasteful" PoW, miners would not attempt this as they
| would hemorrhage money doing that.
|
| Withe a "useful" PoW, miners could have an outside funding
| source like some institute that pays for protein folding. The
| would not lose money in their attempt to produce a minority
| chain (in proportion to the "usefulness" of their PoW)
| fogof wrote:
| It seems to me that even in the PoW is useful, then both
| the honest and the dishonest miners will be able to get
| outside funding (from the perspective of the research
| institute after all, they are doing the same task). So the
| opportunity cost for dishonest mining is exactly the same -
| you miss out on the block reward more often.
| fallingknife wrote:
| If you had 10% of the network the odds of that would be
| only 1/100K right? Or is that not how this works?
| algo646464 wrote:
| The external reward in "useful" PoW is given to all miners,
| good and bad. So everyone is equally incentivized. In fact
| it should actually increase the participation in the
| network, e.g. those who don't care about cryptocurrency but
| are interested in the "useful" problem being solved.
|
| The external reward by itself provides no competitive
| advantage. It reduces everyone's costs by the same amount.
| Rewriting history still remains difficult.
|
| So what am I missing here?
| VMG wrote:
| Rewriting history needs to be expensive, not just
| difficult. If you decrease the cost of writing history,
| you decrease the penalty of participating in a minority
| chain.
| algo646464 wrote:
| I always understood the security of block-chains as a
| race between the good and the bad agents.
|
| Both are extending their respective chains as fast as
| they can. A bad-agent, who wishes to double-spend has to
| rewrite history, and therefore has to start a few step
| behind the good agent. To succeed, the bad agent has to
| overtake the good agent.
|
| Even if both have the same speed (i.e. 50% computational
| power each), the good agent will sill be a few steps
| ahead of the bad agent, and the system is secure. If the
| bad agent is faster(51%), then eventually it will
| overtake the good agent breaking security.
|
| This is true even if the cost of computation is zero
| (e.g. the Govt. pays for all your computation cost). As
| long as the bad agent doesn't have 51% or more of the
| computational power, the system is secure.
| VMG wrote:
| 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 20%
| hashrate ever finds 6 blocks in a row.
|
| When an attack is successful, everybody will mine on the
| attackers chain - including the honest miners. The
| attackers chain is valid after all, it just has a
| different valid transaction set.
|
| The significance of the 51% hashpower is that the
| attacker is _guaranteed_ to succeed over a long-enough
| time horizon.
|
| Reducing or removing the costs of mining a parallel chain
| (even for miners with 20% hashpower) reduces their cost
| to mine a parallel chain and weakens the security
| guarantee. If a miner can work on a side chain and get
| paid for protein folding at the same time, he can keep
| doing it without losing money on electricity. When he
| finally succeeds, he will _also_ cash in the mining
| reward.
| algo646464 wrote:
| 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 it would be longer than the real chain.
|
| This is equivalent to the expected number of coin tosses
| to get 6 consecutive heads, where the coin is heads with
| probability 1/5. Here, heads means that a fake block is
| mined before the corresponding real block is mined. This
| number is less than 20000, which corresponds to about 6
| months of time. This is expensive, but not infeasible.
| They just need to remain solvent until they succeed and
| then easily cover the costs.
| [deleted]
| roboticmind wrote:
| For those that are wondering how this works, Gridcoin uses PoS -
| not PoW - and then rewards for research on top of it. It is not
| locked into any algorithm because it's not PoW. There are
| currently 18 different BOINC project [1] that it rewards. New
| projects can be voted in or can be voted off.
|
| To try to reduce the centralization, there is a system of oracles
| that gathers the stats from each project and the nodes verify
| that the oracles match each other. As well, each project only
| consists of 1/18th of the rewards [2] from research and there's
| also new coins rewarded for just staking, so if a project acts
| up, they wouldn't be able to largely manipulate coin supply.
|
| If you have any more questions about it, feel free to ask me
|
| [1] https://gridcoin.us/guides/whitelist.htm
|
| [2] https://gridcoin.us/wiki/magnitude.html
|
| Note: I help work on the gridcoin.us website and have ~5000
| Gridcoin, so I may be biased in my view of the coin :)
| noxer wrote:
| Whats the use for the coin? Its an incentive obviously but its
| only so because it has a price tag. Who should buy the coin
| from me if I "mined" one and what would he do with it?
| roboticmind wrote:
| As one of the commenters mention, it's an issue with all
| cryptocurrencies. Right now one of the reason people want to
| get Gridcoin is to get enough to stake regularly to earn
| their rewards or because they believe in the coin. In the
| future, there's been some ideas floating around that I think
| are very interesting. For instance, one idea that's been
| floating around is to create a service that accepts GRC and
| offers assistance to researchers for setting up a BOINC
| project
| noxer wrote:
| 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 offers assistance to
| researchers for setting up a BOINC project
|
| so its used as a medium of exchange which boils down to the
| price tag it has. you could just pay someone with normal
| money no one would want to be paid in gridcoin unless one
| gets overpaid. Obviously this is also not a use case.
| stonesweep wrote:
| 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 is... well, it has a lot
| of users having to deal with it not working right/needing
| repaired frequently (see /r/gridcoin).
|
| There were a few businesses accepting the coins for
| awhile (VPN providers, there was a hosting provider for a
| bit, I think a stickers/mugs/tshirt website, etc.) but
| that seemed to have dried up by 2019. The community
| itself has always seemed nice/pleasant, this is not a
| comment on those working the coin just on it's actual
| viability in real life - kinda has no use beyond owning
| it to make and own more of it as a curiosity. When I
| stopped using/trying I just dumped whatever random couple
| hundred coins I had into a public faucet, wasn't worth
| the hassle of trying to cash out $10 after a year of
| participating.
| roboticmind wrote:
| I'll admit it's not great right now, but I don't know if
| I understand what you view as a use case? If using it to
| get things of value with it is not a use case, then what
| coin or currency has any use case? Everything is a
| transfer of value even beyond just currencies be it paid
| in time or other things
|
| > Reward paid in, let me guess, more coins. self fueling
| like most other coins. Thats not a real usecase
|
| It's also worth noting that you don't have to go through
| it if you use a pool, and there's work on making it not
| require pools if you don't want to start out with any
| Gridcoin. If you look up Gridcoin and "Manual rewards
| claim" you'll find some of the discussion about it.
|
| > so it has religion-like properties, awesome /s not a
| use case
|
| I was thinking more in terms of some of the reasons why
| Gridcoin's developers have Gridcoin - not necessarily
| advocating for others to do the same. I should have
| clarified that I didn't think this was a use case
|
| I should also mention that having Gridcoin helps you in
| polls. Gridcoin has a system of polls and the polls are
| weighted by how much work you do in BOINC and how many
| coins you have. Note that it's your amount of those
| before a poll so you can't try to gain more influence
| after learning of a poll. It of course has its own issues
| and discussions about how or if votes should be weighted
| deeeeplearning wrote:
| >Whats the use for the coin? Its an incentive obviously but
| its only so because it has a price tag. Who should buy the
| coin from me if I "mined" one and what would he do with it?
|
| This is the same for any crypto coin. Certainly not unique to
| Gridcoin.
| noxer wrote:
| That doesn't answer the question.
| neolefty wrote:
| It's more a history question than a technical question.
| What's the use of Bitcoin or Ethereum?
| noxer wrote:
| Bitcoin was mean to be p2p cash. It has no legitimate use
| case anymore as it obviously failed to be p2p cash.
|
| Ethereum tried to be many things mostly a decentral
| computer. Turned out to be a super expensive decentral
| computer and that it isn't really so decentral in the
| current version. However its technically used this way by
| some people so that de-facto means it has a valid use
| case. It can hardly compete against newer similar
| projects but thats another story.
| odrekf wrote:
| The Bitcoin idea didn't fail to be cash. BTC failed to be
| cash because it forced a permanent 1mb block size limit.
| If you want to see the original Bitcoin idea working as a
| charm, use Bitcoin Cash (BCH).
| RinTohsaka wrote:
| Or check out Monero!
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