Gridcoin dates back to 2013, and is one of a large number of "altcoins" that was released during Bitcoin's last price surge and bubble of media attention. It uses proof of stake, which greatly decreases the computing power needed to secure the block chain -- am approach used by many other alt coins. There have been a lot of criticisms of PoS over the years, including here at HN. The most prominent being that PoS coins often use checkpoints which mean they are not truly decentralized. The "Proof of Research" seems gimmicky to me, and maybe I'm a cynic, but my impression of Gridcoin has always been that it is just another attempt to cash in and doesn't do anything particularly useful. PrimeCoin is another example from the same time period.
On the plus side BOINC has credibility as a scientific computing platform so at least the incentives line up as opposed to the purely speculative aspect of many other altcoins.
In all honesty this is what I've been waiting for in terms of a useful cryptocurrency. Now if we could only decentralize the control of what projects the processing goes towards with smart contracts then we could have a coin with more actual utility. Imagine the hash rate of the BTC network going towards some useful calculations.
As of the afternoon of August 29, 2017 (Eastern Time), the Curecoin Team 224497 earned the world's #1 rank on Stanford's Folding@home - a protein folding simulation Distributed Computing Network (DCN). In a little over 3 years, the team (including our merge-folding partners at Foldingcoin) collectively produced 160 billion points worth of molecular computations to support research in the areas of cancer, Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, Infectious Disease as well as helping scientists uncover new molecular dynamics through groundbreaking computational techniques.
"""
The projects SONM and Golem are trying to do what you describe. Their plan is to use the Ethereum blockchain to sell miners' computing power in units of their coins, thus giving the coins practical value. Neither one is ready enough to buy from yet.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but this isn't actually "mining" in the Bitcoin sense. IIRC, the coins are issued based on a centralized determination (by the involved scientific organizations?) of whether the work you are doing is useful.
Every time I see this on HN, there are a lot of people who are excited because they think that this is somehow "a useful proof of work", or an alternative to proof of work. It doesn't actually have anything to do with proof of work.
Maybe the idea of paying people for scientific computing with newly-created crypto coins is a worthy innovation, but I suspect that much of the interest around this based around people who are confused about what proof of work is.
I like GRC a lot. I think proof-of-stake is much more efficient than proof-of-work, because it doesn't require massive ongoing calculations in perpetuity. I like the idea of giving out the coins for doing useful calculations, rather than for burning cycles.
My criticisms: it's pretty easy for a user to set up BOINC and start contributing, but not so easy to integrate it with GRC and start collecting gridcoin. Their client software needs a usability overhaul. Also, the selection of projects by BOINC seems somewhat arbitrary - I'm not sure how one gets into their good graces, since I couldn't find public standards or an application process.
I've never understood why GridCoin hasn't caught on yet. One of the chief complaints about Bitcoin is the utter wastefulness of its hashing mechanisms, with hundreds of times more computing power than the top 256 supercomputers combined devoted to pointless busywork just to secure the blockchain.
Imagine if you could have an equally secure cryptocurrency where all that computing power was diverted to curing cancer, discovering new drugs to treat dangerous diseases, understanding the human genome, researching dark matter, and so on. That's GridCoin.
And yet today Bitcoin is worth $14,484 and GridCoin is worth 12 cents.
Because it's a silly concept. The whole point of hashing as a proof of work is that verification is faster than generation... It's a one way function. If you intend to use scientific computation as proof of work, then in most cases, verification is just as difficult as generation, so now all you've done is wasted computation by repeating your calculation each time you're verifying. In other cases (protein folding e.g.) which might be a one way function if formulated correctly the difficulty of work is not meaningfully measurable which creates uncertainty in the underlying value of the coin or the cost of mining. Another problem is that it breaks distributed trust since how can you be really sure that the problem is legitimately solved if it's scientific unknown.
I can't say why it hasn't caught on yet, but in my opinion, it is fragile, at least when compared to other coins.
Here the reward one gets purely depends on the score they get on specific BOINC projects, which can be seen as a single point of failure. So if someone is able to fudge their BOINC scores, they're able to create Gridcoins that they shouldn't get.
While other coins aren't as resourceful as this, I feel their network's security is backed by (atleast seemingly) air-tight cryptography. Not to say that Gridcoin is insecure currently, but the centralization with BOINC shows it doesn't have a bright future.
Primecoin (sign: Ψ; code: XPM) is a peer-to-peer open source cryptocurrency that implements a unique scientific computing proof-of-work system. Primecoin's proof-of-work system searches for chains of prime numbers.
* GridCoin offers comparatively low payout for the electricity required; you're not making money, you're just getting a discount on a research donation.
* GridCoin is highly inflationary and there's no inbuilt means of curtailing the supply.
If Gridcoin gets popular, then it would be worth it to create a very optimized algorithm for something that looks kinda like protein folding (or weather simulation or any vaguely interesting sciency problem; it doesn't need to actually be useful), create a project based around using volunteer computer time to compute the same problem (with a much less optimized algorithm than yours), and then spend millions on PR and/or bribes to try to get the project to be included into BOINC/Gridcoin. Once it's included on Gridcoin, buy a lot of cloud instances to run your optimized algorithm, and mine tons of Gridcoin that you immediately sell. Maybe keep a PR person on payroll to put out media releases about how useful the data generated by the project is, so that way Gridcoin doesn't ever remove your project. Maybe make some donations to some universities to get a bunch of professors to say nice things about it too. You're literally printing money, so you can afford it.
In other words, I think the necessary centralization of a project like Gridcoin is a large exploitable flaw.
Woah, things are really happening in the intersection of engineering and money. I was sceptical a few years ago, but now that quite a number of applications using technology in the blockchain/bitcoin world are appearing, does it really seem like all this is likely to stay. Maybe the things we see popping up today won't remain permanently, but I can't imagine that it won't lead to something really cool within a half decade or so.
I think anyone who looks at bitcoin thinks "what we need is a proof-of-work scheme with positive externalities". But when you look at the actual constraints of the proof-of-work-- unpredictable, unsolved problems with automatic difficulty adjustment-- you realize implementing this idea in a decentralized manner will take almost as big a breakthrough as Satoshi himself made.
I thought of this idea a couple of weeks ago. Make the mining aspect useful work (e.g. solve folding proteins). I am glad someone is doing this. An excellent idea.
[+] [-] whyenot|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cprayingmantis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] westurner|8 years ago|reply
https://curecoin.net
""" CureCoin Reaches #1 Ranking on Folding@home
As of the afternoon of August 29, 2017 (Eastern Time), the Curecoin Team 224497 earned the world's #1 rank on Stanford's Folding@home - a protein folding simulation Distributed Computing Network (DCN). In a little over 3 years, the team (including our merge-folding partners at Foldingcoin) collectively produced 160 billion points worth of molecular computations to support research in the areas of cancer, Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, Infectious Disease as well as helping scientists uncover new molecular dynamics through groundbreaking computational techniques. """
[+] [-] comicjk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iak8god|8 years ago|reply
Unfortunatly BTC mining now runs almost entirely on ASICs that can't be used to compute anything but SHA-256.
[+] [-] shanev|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woah|8 years ago|reply
Every time I see this on HN, there are a lot of people who are excited because they think that this is somehow "a useful proof of work", or an alternative to proof of work. It doesn't actually have anything to do with proof of work.
Maybe the idea of paying people for scientific computing with newly-created crypto coins is a worthy innovation, but I suspect that much of the interest around this based around people who are confused about what proof of work is.
[+] [-] comicjk|8 years ago|reply
My criticisms: it's pretty easy for a user to set up BOINC and start contributing, but not so easy to integrate it with GRC and start collecting gridcoin. Their client software needs a usability overhaul. Also, the selection of projects by BOINC seems somewhat arbitrary - I'm not sure how one gets into their good graces, since I couldn't find public standards or an application process.
[+] [-] Kattywumpus|8 years ago|reply
Imagine if you could have an equally secure cryptocurrency where all that computing power was diverted to curing cancer, discovering new drugs to treat dangerous diseases, understanding the human genome, researching dark matter, and so on. That's GridCoin.
And yet today Bitcoin is worth $14,484 and GridCoin is worth 12 cents.
[+] [-] dnautics|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ktta|8 years ago|reply
Here the reward one gets purely depends on the score they get on specific BOINC projects, which can be seen as a single point of failure. So if someone is able to fudge their BOINC scores, they're able to create Gridcoins that they shouldn't get.
While other coins aren't as resourceful as this, I feel their network's security is backed by (atleast seemingly) air-tight cryptography. Not to say that Gridcoin is insecure currently, but the centralization with BOINC shows it doesn't have a bright future.
[+] [-] grubles|8 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin
[+] [-] ashleyn|8 years ago|reply
* GridCoin is highly inflationary and there's no inbuilt means of curtailing the supply.
[+] [-] AndrewBissell|8 years ago|reply
Well if it's securing the blockchain it can't be that pointless.
Some good arguments here for why "useless" proof-of-work is actually quite useful: http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/
[+] [-] AgentME|8 years ago|reply
In other words, I think the necessary centralization of a project like Gridcoin is a large exploitable flaw.
[+] [-] tw1010|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymous5133|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tomminn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iandanforth|8 years ago|reply
http://foldingcoin.net/
[+] [-] SubiculumCode|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rebuilder|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Proven|8 years ago|reply
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