A recent message came through from Byteball regarding the payment (airdrop) of bytes for participation through byteball in the World Community Grid project. I have previously posted about this so felt an update now would be a good idea. The WCG project itself is excellent, with the aim of using people's spare computing power to perform calculations needed in medical research.
For several months now, I and a number of other Steemians have been crunching WCG and earning Byteballs. My personal income from a "nothing flash" PC and occasionally on my phone has been nice. My average earnings would have been in the order of 0.008 Gbytes per day. This equates to around $0.25 USD per day, basically passive income. I have regularly converted this into STEEM to boost my Steem account along.
As a financial source of crypto income, the program has changed dramatically.
The effect of this is basically a 90% drop in return. my last few payments have been 1/10th of what I had been getting, way less than the cost of electricity to run the program. Their message says it was never intended to be an income, but in effect it was. Now with the new reward schedule, this nice little earner is gone. From Byteballs side of things, I can totally understand why they have done this. The bytes they were giving out had grown with many people adding multiple computers to the network, and reaping rewards greater than traditional crypto mining. It was not sustainable for them to keep handing out so much of their reserves this way. Fully understand it, but, what to do now?
So, for those of us looking for a little bit of crypto income, what are our options now?
- I have heard of Gridcoin, which I believe is a coin rewarded for crunching on WCG but I am yet to do any research on it. I'd love to hear from anyone that knows how it works, and is involved with it.
- Go back to mining crypto like Monero.
- Something else?
- Keep as is and still feel warm and fuzzy about helping research, but without the bonus income.
I'd love to hear from other WCG crunchers as to what your plans are now moving forward.
Going to tag @flemingfarm as I know he joined up after a post of mine a while back, and I'm interested to see his opinion also.
Cheers,
John.
90% difference from one day to the next. I get what their aim was in doing it but I am not willing to put my computing power to their team now with that much of a cut. I quit the byteball team and joined the gridcoin. It is not as nice as byteball earnings since you only get paid when you stake a block so it requires a healthy number of GRC to start with. I have a few hundred GRC and the wallet says 353 days till stake so it seems that I need a few thousand to actually stake somewhat regularly.
I'm hoping that the byteball team reverses their decision since I would presume they just lost a large number of people "mining" for the team. For now though I am on the gridcoin side and will see if this is at all worth it once I can get a couple thousand more GRC in my wallet.
The solution is to use a pool, I think there are two operative now, one of them is working for quite a long time and has great support and feedback.
Will look into the pools next week when I have more time. Just going to save some electricity for now.
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I started out pool mining, I think most Gridcoin miners do, I went solo after a few months of collecting the pool rewards.
I set up a Gridcoin wallet and transferred my pool earnings to it until I had enough balance to stake a reward within approximately 30 days then went solo.
BOINC research rewards do time out eventually, I think you have 6 months to stake before losing rewards so being part of a pool is a good way to build up an initial balance while the pool regularly stakes research rewards on your behalf.
If you already have other crypto-currency or want to invest $ then you can bypass the pool mining stage by purchasing GRC through a crypto-currency marketplace.
If you don't care about having BOINC credits in your own name then you could continue using the pool mining services for as long as it suit you.
Thanks heaps for your input, I am thinking the same. Been swamped so only getting to this now. Will look into gridcoin and see if it will suit me. I'll be surprised if byteball reverse this, as I understand it isn't an inflationary currency and payments were being made out of their projects reserves.
Gotta go learn about gridcoin now.
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From my experience this new adjustment makes the payout on par with Gridcoin's. I think Byteball is shifting distribution strategies towards application development, which is probably a good idea. I've entered their use-a-thon which could be a good start for you too.
GRC through competition, not through reduction though.
I'll have a look at gridcoin when I have some spare time, but for now I have turned my XMR mining back on. As for the "use-a-thon" i have absolutely zero skill as a programmer or developer so it does me no good.
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In case you are using GPUs only for XMR mining, why don't you run both XMR mining and WCG crunching concurrently because WCG only support CPUs.
Besides there is a fundamental difference in underlying philosophy, WCG crunching advances science while XMR mining is 'just' generating heat.
Yeah, I definitely prefer the wcg philosophy over POW mining in general. Have turned XMR back off, my pc isn't good enough to get anything decent. Thanks for your input.
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