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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 hun

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.

AndrewBissell 9y ago
> pointless busywork just to secure the blockchain 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/ http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/
grubles 9y ago
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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin
- taberiand 9y ago
  Is or was? My (admittedly brief) look into this suggests it's dead or dying
  - alexcnwy 9y ago
    It's up 105% this week so someone thinks it's still alive.
- akvadrako 9y ago
  Primecoin is dead - go to their website and click on "Forums". Or find the network node explorer online.
  - grubles 9y ago
    Looks like it's very much alive: http://xpm.muuttuja.org/charts/ http://xpm.muuttuja.org/charts/
ktta 9y ago
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.
- KVFinn 9y ago
  >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. Yeah. I'm rooting for them to figure this out because it would be wonderful if all those GPUs could be doing science rather than arbitrary calculations, but if this coin ever went big, I can't see how it would deal with exploits like this.
ashleyn 9y ago
* 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.
- nerdponx 9y ago
  There's nothing wrong with inflationary currency as long as the supply expands at a fixed/steady rate.
  - beefield 9y ago
    From macroeconomic perspective it does not matter if the monetary supply is fixed or just pre-defined, it is equally bad idea. If you want to have a currency that society runs on, that is.
    - dmichulke 9y ago
      May I ask what macroeconomic perspective that is?
      - dnautics 9y ago
        It's terrible because you can't steal from the poor to fund the investment adventures of the wealthy.
      - beefield 9y ago
        Of course. You can and want to adjust aggregate demand by monetary policy. I do not claim that current central banks do perfect job (biggest problem for the last decade has been inability to set properly negative interest rates), but at least to me it is obvious that of you do not manage aggregate demand you end up with massive cycles in economy that cause havoc.
        dnautics 9y ago
dnautics 9y ago
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.
- wellboy 9y ago
  Why not reward computation power by the amount of kwh they have spent, regardless of if their computation was worth it or worthless.
  - boulos 9y ago
    kWh isn’t a good metric of computational output though. You want to encourage people to do more useful work for you; if that means they should tune their code for a fancy GPU, then kWh probably won’t correlate (a single package server CPU is about 145W, a server class GPU about 300W, but the GPU usually performs way more compute).
  - mpeg 9y ago
    Then you have to verify, and as he says, you end up duplicating the work.
    - dnautics 9y ago
      duplicating is very optimistic. Over a distributed network, to achieve trust, it will have to be (n) where n is the average (over all time) number of agents that care about the validity of the chain. Then don't forget to multiply by k^2 where k is the expected blockchain chain length over all time. As an approximation...

AndrewBissell 9y ago

> pointless busywork just to secure the blockchain 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/ http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

grubles 9y ago

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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin

taberiand 9y ago
Is or was? My (admittedly brief) look into this suggests it's dead or dying
- alexcnwy 9y ago
  It's up 105% this week so someone thinks it's still alive.
akvadrako 9y ago
Primecoin is dead - go to their website and click on "Forums". Or find the network node explorer online.
- grubles 9y ago
  Looks like it's very much alive: http://xpm.muuttuja.org/charts/ http://xpm.muuttuja.org/charts/

ktta 9y ago

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.

KVFinn 9y ago
>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. Yeah. I'm rooting for them to figure this out because it would be wonderful if all those GPUs could be doing science rather than arbitrary calculations, but if this coin ever went big, I can't see how it would deal with exploits like this.

ashleyn 9y ago

* 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.

nerdponx 9y ago
There's nothing wrong with inflationary currency as long as the supply expands at a fixed/steady rate.
- beefield 9y ago
  From macroeconomic perspective it does not matter if the monetary supply is fixed or just pre-defined, it is equally bad idea. If you want to have a currency that society runs on, that is.
  - dmichulke 9y ago
    May I ask what macroeconomic perspective that is?
    - dnautics 9y ago
      It's terrible because you can't steal from the poor to fund the investment adventures of the wealthy.
    - beefield 9y ago
      Of course. You can and want to adjust aggregate demand by monetary policy. I do not claim that current central banks do perfect job (biggest problem for the last decade has been inability to set properly negative interest rates), but at least to me it is obvious that of you do not manage aggregate demand you end up with massive cycles in economy that cause havoc.
      - dnautics 9y ago

dnautics 9y ago

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.

wellboy 9y ago
Why not reward computation power by the amount of kwh they have spent, regardless of if their computation was worth it or worthless.
- boulos 9y ago
  kWh isn’t a good metric of computational output though. You want to encourage people to do more useful work for you; if that means they should tune their code for a fancy GPU, then kWh probably won’t correlate (a single package server CPU is about 145W, a server class GPU about 300W, but the GPU usually performs way more compute).
- mpeg 9y ago
  Then you have to verify, and as he says, you end up duplicating the work.
  - dnautics 9y ago
    duplicating is very optimistic. Over a distributed network, to achieve trust, it will have to be (n) where n is the average (over all time) number of agents that care about the validity of the chain. Then don't forget to multiply by k^2 where k is the expected blockchain chain length over all time. As an approximation...