
Gridcoin: Rewarding Scientific Distributed Computing - trueduke
http://gridcoin.us/
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whyenot
Gridcoin dates back to 2013, and is one of a large number of "altcoins" that
was released during Bitcoin's last price surge and bubble of media attention.
It uses proof of stake, which greatly decreases the computing power needed to
secure the block chain -- am approach used by many other alt coins. There have
been a lot of criticisms of PoS over the years, including here at HN. The most
prominent being that PoS coins often use checkpoints which mean they are not
truly decentralized. The "Proof of Research" seems gimmicky to me, and maybe
I'm a cynic, but my impression of Gridcoin has always been that it is just
another attempt to cash in and doesn't do anything particularly useful.
PrimeCoin is another example from the same time period.

~~~
anigbrowl
On the plus side BOINC has credibility as a scientific computing platform so
at least the incentives line up as opposed to the purely speculative aspect of
many other altcoins.

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cprayingmantis
In all honesty this is what I've been waiting for in terms of a useful
cryptocurrency. Now if we could only decentralize the control of what projects
the processing goes towards with smart contracts then we could have a coin
with more actual utility. Imagine the hash rate of the BTC network going
towards some useful calculations.

~~~
comicjk
The projects SONM and Golem are trying to do what you describe. Their plan is
to use the Ethereum blockchain to sell miners' computing power in units of
their coins, thus giving the coins practical value. Neither one is ready
enough to buy from yet.

~~~
cprayingmantis
Thanks for passing the info along I'll be sure to check them out.

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woah
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but this isn't actually "mining" in the
Bitcoin sense. IIRC, the coins are issued based on a centralized determination
(by the involved scientific organizations?) of whether the work you are doing
is useful.

Every time I see this on HN, there are a lot of people who are excited because
they think that this is somehow "a useful proof of work", or an alternative to
proof of work. It doesn't actually have anything to do with proof of work.

Maybe the idea of paying people for scientific computing with newly-created
crypto coins is a worthy innovation, but I suspect that much of the interest
around this based around people who are confused about what proof of work is.

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comicjk
I like GRC a lot. I think proof-of-stake is much more efficient than proof-of-
work, because it doesn't require massive ongoing calculations in perpetuity. I
like the idea of giving out the coins for doing useful calculations, rather
than for burning cycles.

My criticisms: it's pretty easy for a user to set up BOINC and start
contributing, but not so easy to integrate it with GRC and start collecting
gridcoin. Their client software needs a usability overhaul. Also, the
selection of projects by BOINC seems somewhat arbitrary - I'm not sure how one
gets into their good graces, since I couldn't find public standards or an
application process.

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Kattywumpus
I've never understood why GridCoin hasn't caught on yet. One of the chief
complaints about Bitcoin is the utter wastefulness of its hashing mechanisms,
with hundreds of times more computing power than the top 256 supercomputers
_combined_ devoted to pointless busywork just to secure the blockchain.

Imagine if you could have an equally secure cryptocurrency where all that
computing power was diverted to curing cancer, discovering new drugs to treat
dangerous diseases, understanding the human genome, researching dark matter,
and so on. That's GridCoin.

And yet today Bitcoin is worth $14,484 and GridCoin is worth 12 cents.

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grubles
Primecoin (sign: Ψ; code: XPM) is a peer-to-peer open source cryptocurrency
that implements a unique scientific computing proof-of-work system.
Primecoin's proof-of-work system searches for chains of prime numbers.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin)

~~~
akvadrako
Primecoin is dead - go to their website and click on "Forums". Or find the
network node explorer online.

~~~
grubles
Looks like it's very much alive:
[http://xpm.muuttuja.org/charts/](http://xpm.muuttuja.org/charts/)

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AgentME
If Gridcoin gets popular, then it would be worth it to create a very optimized
algorithm for something that looks kinda like protein folding (or weather
simulation or any vaguely interesting sciency problem; it doesn't need to
actually be useful), create a project based around using volunteer computer
time to compute the same problem (with a much less optimized algorithm than
yours), and then spend _millions_ on PR and/or bribes to try to get the
project to be included into BOINC/Gridcoin. Once it's included on Gridcoin,
buy a lot of cloud instances to run your optimized algorithm, and mine tons of
Gridcoin that you immediately sell. Maybe keep a PR person on payroll to put
out media releases about how useful the data generated by the project is, so
that way Gridcoin doesn't ever remove your project. Maybe make some donations
to some universities to get a bunch of professors to say nice things about it
too. You're literally printing money, so you can afford it.

In other words, I think the necessary centralization of a project like
Gridcoin is a large exploitable flaw.

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tw1010
Woah, things are really happening in the intersection of engineering and
money. I was sceptical a few years ago, but now that quite a number of
applications using technology in the blockchain/bitcoin world are appearing,
does it really seem like all this is likely to stay. Maybe the things we see
popping up today won't remain permanently, but I can't imagine that it won't
lead to _something_ really cool within a half decade or so.

~~~
anonymous5133
Like everything, not all of it will stay but the stuff that does still will
become something equivalent to a google or facebook in significance.

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Tomminn
I think anyone who looks at bitcoin thinks "what we need is a proof-of-work
scheme with positive externalities". But when you look at the actual
constraints of the proof-of-work-- unpredictable, unsolved problems with
automatic difficulty adjustment-- you realize implementing this idea in a
decentralized manner will take almost as big a breakthrough as Satoshi himself
made.

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iandanforth
Folding coin appears to be another in this genre.

[http://foldingcoin.net/](http://foldingcoin.net/)

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SubiculumCode
I thought of this idea a couple of weeks ago. Make the mining aspect useful
work (e.g. solve folding proteins). I am glad someone is doing this. An
excellent idea.

~~~
rebuilder
But how do you do it without centralizing coin issuance?

~~~
SubiculumCode
I overstated. I just had the thought that it would be nice if coin issuance
would depend on some type of useful work (e.g. protein folding), and was glad
to see that others who know a whole lot more about how cryptocurrency works,
have created schemes to do just that. I have no idea on how to do it without
centralizing coin issuance.

~~~
rebuilder
Unfortunately, no-one seems to know how to do it. It is a pretty hard problem:
issuance tied to proof of work works because the solutions it generates are
unique but machine verifiable. Unfortunately, problems with solutions that
fulfill that requirement tend not to be very useful in and of themselves.

Edit: this is well beyond my expertise, perhaps someone with a better
understanding of information theory can prove the above statement wrong. In
that case, I hope they go out and build a crypto of their own!

