In order to address that problem, we discussed ways to incentivize crunching smaller projects if they fall below a certain threshold; that solution is discussed in the third point of the "Impact of the Changes" section.
However, I'd like to point out a few things:
- The Gridcoin network only supplies around 46% of TNGrid's RAC - see @parejan's post from today, first table, "Team RAC vs Overall RAC %". So even if all of the Gridcoin crunchers left, TNGrid would still have more than half of their computing power.
- It's not certain that people will just leave smaller projects if there is no artificial incentive to crunch them, so it's quite likely that TNGrid would still keep a good number of Gridcoin crunchers.
- The project was launched before Gridcoin was even created, so they must have had funding and resources before Gridcoin came along. For this reason, I don't think that the project would be "dead" if we dropped the artificial incentive to crunch it.
Personally, I advocate for total normalization without artificial incentives - I think that there are other ways to incentivize people to crunch smaller projects than the incentives that we currently have in place.
However, I understand that others in our community do not agree, and that's what the compromise was intended to address - there is still a way to economically incentivize crunching smaller projects whilst also dropping our current reward mechanism in favor of the one that I'm proposing. For that reason, I don't think that this issue affects the viability or desirability of adopting this proposal, since it also has many other benefits.
I just used TNGrid as an example. Even though that 46% sounds great, and, as per prorject's status site, total number of users today is 600. Lets imagine Gridcoin is half, which would leave project with 300 hosts...which sounds to me an almost "dead" project. Just compare with SETI or LHC. If GRC incentive moved 1% of gridcoin RAC to TNGrid, project would end "tomorrow".
I dont like artificial manipulation of the incentives. However, the word "incentive" itself needs to be helpful for projects needing it.
Fair enough. Ultimately the decision would have to be voted on, and it's certainly within our power to maintain some sort of artificial incentive to crunch smaller projects if that's what we decide we want. Alternatively, we might find other ways to make sure that projects get the crunching power they need - like developing a tool that allows new users to spread their processing power equally across all projects (or something like that), or increasing education efforts so that crunchers know about the importance of the smaller projects. In general, I think that eliminating the artificial incentives eliminates a huge distraction from the actual projects themselves, which is actually one of the reasons I started writing on this topic (I mentioned this in my earliest posts regarding Gridcoin's incentive mechanism).