Hi @teamsteem, I'll try clarify for you.
The actual research we are talking about here is distributed through the BOINC platform by research organisations. These organisations all run their own servers, and distribute 'credit' at their own internal rates. Therefore, 10 credit on one server may be equivalent in terms of work to 1000 credits on the next server.
The way Gridcoin deals with this issue is that the daily GRC awarded is split evenly between the projects, and then split based on credit between the miners on each project server. This way, one server can't break or cheat the system by awarding millions of credits for free in return for practically no research.
The real issue with this type of mining is collating the data from all the servers, as they can be taken offline for many reasons. Gridcoin backpays work though, so even if a server was taken offline the miner does not lose any earnings, instead being paid when the project is next registered by the Gridcoin network.
I hope that helps. Let me know if you have any more questions. =)
Is this a 100% trustless system or doesn't the system have to rely on the honesty of those who distribute the credit.
If so I'd love to be able to see the documentation on this because back then there was no known solution to this problem and as far as I'm aware this is still the cause due tot he limitation of creating useful information through "mining" through BIONIC vs creating useless information (besides securing the network) through proof-of-work mining.
The credit is distributed by the projects, so I suppose that could in theory be cheated by the project admins. Gridcoin is distributed entirely autonomously based on those credit numbers. Therefore, the Gridcoin proportion of the payout chain is trustless (all the source code is on github).
At worst, a project admin would be able to give one user infinite credits on a regular basis, and the Gridcoin network would then pay out:
[1/number_of_projects]*daily_GRC_mint
to that user. So, yes, there is some potential for abuse. It will never happen though as:
Projects are carefully vetted before being eligible for reward. This is based on a community vote adding the project to the rewards 'whitelist'.
The project admins are researchers that want BOINC and Gridcoin members to help them complete their studies. They have no motivation to cheat the system (plus it would be pretty obvious).
I am not sure I entirely understand the second part of your comment. The Gridcoin network does both. Primarily, it 'mines' through BOINC work but the network is additionally secured by a POS system which continues to function even if BOINC is 100% down.
You answers my questions. That's exactly what I read before. Gridcoin isn't fully trustless at this point. Nonetheless it is working at this point and doing some good but because it isn't fully trustless it cannot expect to do what a trustless crypto can do.
I wonder if EOS could help making an idea like Gridcoin to become trustless.
EOS is very interesting, much like all the Graphene based systems we have today. But it would not help Gridcoin become more trustless in the fact that it still needs to rely on the BOINC projects statistics that they generate and base the rewards thereafter.
But as @dutch points out, this is the reason the community votes on new projects and that not all projects are just automatically included.
The network itself is secured enough with the basic PoS system that it is built upon.