Hello fellow BOINCers and Gridcoiners!
I just wanted to share my thoughts on what I believe has been a continuing missed opportunity for Gridcoin and its further development.
First and foremost, I'm a true fan of PrimeGrid and have been crunching there since 2010 although I'm pretty new to the GRC scene and crypto-currency as a whole with just over 120 days experience.
I first discovered Gridcoin as a result of seeing "Gridcoin" at the top of the team leader board on the Primegrid website. Not only was Gridcoin in first place every single day, but by a HUGE margin. The next closest team is Aggie the Pew (my former team, but had to leave in order to join team Gridcoin), and team Aggie the Pew has massive crunching power, so much power, it makes cloud computing, combined as a whole, seem like a joke. And yet, here's team Gridcoin at the top, usually double that power. Don't take my word for it, visit (https://www.primegrid.com) and look at the team stats at the bottom right of the screen.
I'm writing this today because Primegrid is having a competition in its classic 321 Prime search. Being a hardcore Primegrid cruncher, I set my Primegrid preferences to the 321 search and began crunching. I checked the leaderboard for both team and individual rankings only to be highly disappointed in the fact that I was #231 out of 305 participants. 
I wasn't disappointed in my individual ranking for the reason that I'm only running 2 cores on my i5 Haswell, downclocked from 3.5 ghz to 3.0ghz, but because there was no one above me in the rankings from team Gridcoin. NOBODY. ZILCH, NADA. Furthermore, there were only two other individuals from team Gridcoin in the entire list at the time... (there are now 6 total Gridcoin team members in the rankings. * Note, GRCPool-2 in the rankings below me...
I then checked the teams stats only to have to scroll down the screen with my mouse to find team Gridcoin sitting at #31.
I am attempting to raise awareness of this issue for two primary reasons:
The first is based upon what I have seen at coingecko.com wherein they rank/rate coins based upon a multitude of factors, but a good portion of the ranking concerns public awareness/social media (relevancy?) Having verified results, i.e, major discoveries that so benefit science to such an extent that I am incapable of expressing here because I am truly lacking in said comprehension, would, I think, bring positive attention to Gridcoin and fulfill Gridcoin's primary purpose. Primegrid has made two major discoveries in the past month, all found by members of Aggie the Pew. The largest Generalized Fermat Prime Number (919444^1048576+1) and 2nd largest prime number ever discovered by Primegrid and the 12th largest prime number discovered in the world. Second, the largest Generalized Cullen-Woodall Prime (1341174·53^1341174+1). Imagine the attention Gridcoin would have received had it even put a mere fraction of its power towards the GCW Tournament last month. or the 321 Tournament still underway.
Second, I believe the admins GRCpool-1 and GRCpool-2 could provide considerable help towards this goal/issue by pointing crunching power to any project having a competition. Perhaps the admins of those pools could provide users with an option that would allow the direction of crunching power to whitelisted project competitions (auto selected with an option for the end-user to opt out if so desired). The admin(s) could then direct resources where and when needed.
On a closing note, I do want to express a big thumbs up to the Gridcoin development team who have been digligently working to improve Gridcoin; I wish I had the skills to help! And a big shout out to all the people on IRC at channel #gridcoin!!
I hope all of you discover your first prime number soon!!!
Welcome to gridcoin comunity, and thanks for giving your opinions!
I support the idea of users having an option to have their pool projects auto selected by admin. But it MUST stay as an option and respect user preferences in what projects to run. Eg, the option will only pause-unpause the projects, but not detach or attach a new one.
Even if pool users check this "auto-select" option, they are still going to complain when their GRC income suddenly drops to zero when they get automatically switched from PPS Sieve to GFN subproject.
This GTX1080 user is a good example - he is getting around 6.5 credits/sec crunching PPS Sieve, but only around 2.1 credits per sec running GFN20. For shorter workunits, like GFN-15 of GFN-16 (which are most likely to quickly reveal a new prime), he would get much less than that, basically all his mag would disappear. Other prime-discovering subprojects are all CPU, meaning they earn even less GRC, since GPU crunchers collect most of the credits.
The PrimeGrid's idea is that users who get a chance to discover a new prime don't need large credits, because they are always honored as prime discoverers, listed on PrimeGrid's webpage and on The Prime Pages. This credit restriction severely limits their GRC income in turn.
We could turn the tide by:
@Otis3506
An update: We are currently in 22nd place of 82 teams in the challenge.
Most Gridcoiners run only PPS Sieve subproject on PrimeGrid because it is very well suited for new Nvidia GPUs and it brings far more credits than any other subproject (which in turn brings more GRC). You can't discover new prime-numbers by running PPS Sieve, you are just doing preparation work, searching and discarding lots of non-prime numbers, so that other subprojects have less to do, focusing on numbers which look like promising candidates for primes.
More about sieving here:
https://steemit.com/mathematics/@cryptohazard/the-prime-numbers-from-mystery-to-reality
I agree to Tomas it could be built in as an optional flag in the pool. I personally would not opt for this because I like to chose by myself. But it could really help to raise more attention to gridcoin if we would make things more public that we are doing here. Iam just not sure how to accomplish that. But I will make up my mind about it... Thanks for the post otis
I cannot say I really agree with the sentiment. It's really about how much computing power we're giving, not about where we place in some temporary competition. The GridCoin team is number 1 in numbers and RAC in PrimeGrid contributors. Right now the gridcoin team gives nearly double the amount of RAC as the next closest team. You could add together teams #2 and #3 and we contribute more RAC than them combined.
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