Hey! So, yes and no. Essentially what I have done here in the lab is set up my own BOINC server, which takes about an afternoon. I am currently working on getting work units ready.
Once I have that done, I will effectively have an active BOINC project that anyone can contribute to. To encourage such contributions, I can 'rain' Gridcoin onto the project. Each user will then receive Gridcoin proportional to their contribution, or any other metric I may want to use. For a whitelisted project, this is taken care of by the wallet, and for non-whitelisted projects there is a python script by @scalextrix.
So, while I can't buy X TFLOPS of compute for Y GRC, I can effectively promote compute on my project.
The planned feature you may be thinking of is project rain, which aims to do the same thing but with a wider range of cryptocurrencies instead of just GRC.
This will end up drastically limiting accessibility to BOINC crunchers. Projects which wish to compete will have to rain GRC on their crunchers instead of just letting GRC reward crunchers for their volunteer work regardless of project operation. This means that only those with the most GRC will be able to run successful projects.
It goes against many of the basic principals of the BOINC community and I am fairly confident there will be some backlash from that community.
This looks very much like BTC Utopia which destroyed GRC reputation.
I could be wrong.
More established projects like SETI@home, WCG, Einstein@home etc. will always have plenty of dedicated crunchers, willing to compute completely for free. That creates an environment in which it is difficult for a new project to get enough volunteers, because you have to compete against established projects and you have to deal with general lack of volunteer computing power. Plenty of new BOINC projects would surely welcome an opportunity to attract some attention with a little GRC rain.
Of course, there will be plenty of crunchers who will insist on running BOINC completely for free and they will have their way too - just install BOINC, run it and there's no crypto in your way.
@vortac I'd love to hear your throughts on @nightshift1134's idea for helping small projects and new users at the same time. It is posted here. I detail some other benefits this GRCStarter@home project might bring in my response in the comments.
It provides the same benefit as rain, but in a way that adheres to the principals set out by BOINC.
What would the GRCStarter@home project actually compute? Because it looks like "lets crunch whatever, it's the agenda that matters" and that's not entirely along the BOINC principles either.
Our current objective is clear: compute something useful->get proportional BOINC credits->get proportional GRC rewards and it applies for every BOINC project (in stark contrast to repetitive PoW hashing). "Compute whatever->get arbitrary RAC->get arbitrary mag" dilutes that objective.
I have created a proposal based off of this conversation. Find it here:
GRCStarter@home Proposal
I agree:
I also agree that:
The WU hosted on GRCStarter@home could be anything. It depends on how its operation is structured:
Perhaps one set of WU is crunched at a time. At any time, someone can propose a different set of WU for GRCStarter and the community votes on whether or not to switch to that work.
Perhaps there is a ledger of WU ready to be processed on GRCStarter. The work is added to this ledger by some process -- voting in, proposal, whatever. There is a poll that runs for a block of time... days, weeks, months, years, whatever. People can change their vote to support different WU sets while the poll is running. The amount of time allotted to specific WU sets is proportional, or some relation, to that sets support in the poll. When the poll ends, there is some process that determines the next ledger of WUs -- maybe it's the sets with the highest support from the previous poll + sets with the highest support in a second poll regarding proposed sets. A poll is then created for the new ledger.
Perhaps GRCStarter is only for researchers which put together proposals for getting their work crunched on GRCStarter and the community votes on the best proposal.
Perhaps there is a limit to the number of work units GRCStarter can run for a project and a time limit each project can run its WU on GRCStarter -- once x number of cobblestone is produced or x number of hours is met, or whatever, the project can no longer host WU on GRCStarter. This means that if a project wants all the attention from new users and philanthropic magsters it must put the effort in to convince the GRC community it is a worthwhile project.
Perhaps, one day, GRCStarter gets integrated into the Gridcoin blockchain and stakers choose which WU get processed through blockchain consensus.
These processes removes the risk of someone buying out, or monopolizing, BOINCs main resource: its processing. This risk is present in a rain system, but can be managed through regulation.
Hey jringo,
I see your point, but as soon as a project gets whitelisted, the Gridcoin distribution happens automatically. As I understand it, this might be a way to finance little projects with just some 1000 WUs or so, adding the GRC rain to attract crunchers quickly! But well, same here, I could be wrong as well! ;)
I think the intent is perfect. Have you read @nightshift1134's idea found here?
I detail how his idea might look and what it achieves in my comment to that post.
I'm interested to hear what you think of that approach of helping little projects instead of an open rain mechanism which makes GRC more like its competitors which have very different goals than Gridcoin.
Little projects get the attention of new users and philanthropic whales!
Out of curiosity, what is your BOINC project focused on?
Additionally, and to support my claim that BOINC does not like this sort of thing, @cm-steem is working on a similar project called Project Rain which was recently rejected from the BOINC GitHub.
I think the idea holds potential, but its execution has to be well thought out.
From David Anderson:
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=11647&postid=79222#79222
I'd love to see BOINC credit used as proof of work for a cryptocurrency. In fact I proposed this to Bitcoin a long time ago; they declined because BOINC isn't fully distributed, fair enough. But this can't be built directly into BOINC, NSF wouldn't be OK with that.
"BOINC credit used as proof of work for a cryptocurrency" is Gridcoin. Anderson is not saying that he wants to make it rain all over BOINC projects.
Making it rain has more to do with distributing gridcoin. Making it rain also effects the BOINC economy -- the resources of BOINC, all that processing power, will go to those who offer the most Gridcoin. This can help small projects, sure, but it will also help people with a lot of money or a lot of Gridcoin. Eventually, and no matter what people will always do (crunch seti), this will lead to consolidation and corruption.
David Anderson said he likes the idea of BOINC computations being rewarded with cryptocurrency and that's an essential point here. Those rewards are monetized and are worth something on the crypto-exchanges and David is obviously fine with that (since he is mentioning that Bitcoin reference).
After that, money follows its own path and one can do with it as he/she likes. I can rain it all over, hoard it, lose it, whatever. You can't have it both ways - being rewarded and completely avoiding the negative aspects of being rewarded. Obviously, benefits outweigh the drawbacks here and I would say that David Anderson (and the BOINC community) understands that.
I dont get that, if you have to keep paying people to crunch your project, you will eventually run out of funds, but all the whitelisted projects will be rewarded indefinately.
Thanks @dutch, last time I checked in the wallet problem wasnt fixed yet https://github.com/gridcoin/Gridcoin-Research/issues/441
Would the University distribute GRC from their own wallet to the users? Where's the funding coming from?
I am funded directly to do my PhD work, so I would be using parts of research grants to buy GRC and spend it on compute.