15 ms·

Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing

230 points by guerrilla 6y ago

CodinM 6y ago
I actually emailed someone at BOINC in July 2015 regarding exactly this, I see the paper came out in December 2015 with the idea. Glad to see it finally becoming a reality.
- foobarbecue 6y ago
  Gridcoin was launched on October 16, 2013 https://gridcoin.us/wiki/ https://gridcoin.us/wiki/
stonesweep 6y ago
I tried out Gridcoin a few years back in it's $0.05 days, its at ~$0.01 now - at the time you had to "buy in" about $100 USD to have enough collateral to work solo (stake to get credit rewards), otherwise you had to join a mining pool to just get paid your meager credits. A basic $5 cloud server cannot generate enough GRC credit to pay for itself at 5 cents.
- gruez 6y ago
  >A basic $5 cloud server cannot generate enough GRC credit to pay for itself at 5 cents. This is totally expected because of how the economics of mining works. If it were profitable to mine with a $5 cloud server then everybody would jump on, difficulty would increase, and it wouldn't be profitable anymore. The miners you're competing against are hobbyists with much cheaper access to compute than you, eg. they've already bought a threadripper workstation for work related purposes and they're just using the spare cycles.
  - stonesweep 6y ago
    > profitable ...I'd settle for "break even" and have it simply pay for itself to perform the scientific work. My personal choice is to participate in the World Community Grid and I tried everything from a cloud server to a 20-core dual E5-2660v2 (rented) and even that amount of power cannot pay for it's monthly (super cheap, $75) rental fees. A laptop with an i5-3320 (something like that) cannot even pay for it's electricity use generating GRC. Not profitable, just break even - that's all a guy like me asks for; it's more efficient if I take cold hard cash and donate it to a comparable cause than it does to run WCG nodes and expect GRC to just cover the electricity cost, ignore the hardware. I don't want to be profitable, just have any rig pay for it's electricity use - that's it. GRC cannot even cover that spread in finances.
  - maerF0x0 6y ago
    > profitable Similar to what stonesweep said, some people have different economics. For example, I have an old computer sitting around. And my home heats by electricity in the winter. Therefore any time I need to heat my home it's 0 marginal cost to instead do mining (of any kind). IMO this is the real future of green efficiency, finding the places where the energy was already "spent" on a high value task, and add a low value task in the chain. Another example could be server farms could water cool and use waste heat for elec generation, low temp plastic melting, or residential hot water...
Forbo 6y ago
I've been trying to bring attention to this project for years. It directly addresses the whole "proof of work is proof of waste" problem. Some of my earliest submissions to HN were about GridCoin, and they largely went compeletely ignored, glad to finally see it on the front page. At least with BOINC you end up with something more worthwhile than just bruteforcing hashes.
- 3np 6y ago
  Same, I even bought some back in... 2014 I think? I'm yet ambivalent on if it's a factor on why it hasn't been able to attract serious attention, but I've heard the argument that doing calculations that have external value outside of PoW breaks the incentive mechanisms. To me, merge mining on Bitcoin[0] and MEV on Ethereum[1] are evidence against that argument, since we already have those forces in play today. So Gridcoins concept should work. [0]: https://blog.bitmex.com/the-growth-of-bitcoin-merge-mining/ https://blog.bitmex.com/the-growth-of-bitcoin-merge-mining/ [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.05234 https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.05234
- hakesdev 6y ago
  If you use a money with an issuance scheme that doesn't derive from pure costs (useless things like hashing), the underlying incentives of that money will seed its own destruction. What happens if you have a coin based on "useful work" and you "solve" the problem you were hoping to solve. Now a lot of "miners" leave the network, presumably because they were only there to help solve that particular problem. Now you have a weak system, and a system subject to 51% attacks by adversarial miners, and therefore not a good money/coin. I don't see how HN commenters (in large part) don't get this. It's the Single-responsibility Principle, just in a different context.
  - Forbo 6y ago
    Considering the number of supercomputers that have been constructed since the days of ENIAC, I don't think we'll be running out of scientific computing problems any time soon. And if we somehow do manage to run out of computing problems, then I guess we've already succeeded.
Kiro 6y ago
How is it verified? I thought the problem with doing useful work instead of normal PoW was that producing and verifying are equally hard, while Bitcoin's PoW scheme is hard to produce but easy to verify (so other miners can easily see that you've actually found the hash without doing any computations themselves).
- Forbo 6y ago
  Even if you have people doubling or tripling up the work on something useful, the end result is infinitely more useful than bruteforced hashes.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dnautics 6y ago
    Don't forget that the usefulness of brute forced hashes is that it lets you have decentralized trust, so, you may be off by a factor of infinity.
    - Robotbeat 6y ago
      Decentralized trust on Bitcoin is an illusion in practicality. There are trust bottlenecks all over the place when most people go to use it. It’s ultimately a quixotic goal. So compromising a bit on mathematical decentralized trustlessness to accomplish some of the other goals of cryptocurrency while addressing the massive waste is a valid goal IMHO.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Folding can be and is verified, however.
- neolefty 6y ago
  It depends on out-of-loop review of the oracles by people, to ensure they stay honest, and that new oracles are honest. Over time, as problems come and go, I assume oracles will be added and retired, so this coin will require manual maintenance. A necessary cost of being interesting?
david_draco 6y ago
How can regulations can make alternative, less climate-harming projects such as this more attractive over bitcoin? Would crypto-currency income taxes or perhaps data center laws (similar to cyber-crime laws) be a useful tool? Or would that only favor lightning networks/PoS and those not declaring earnings.
- keymone 6y ago
  Your aim is off, bitcoin using energy is fine just like any other use of energy is fine, part of the free market of ebergy. It’s production of energy from fossil fuels that isn’t fine.
  - mikepurvis 6y ago
    I don't think that's really true. There are plenty of cases where we can decide collectively as a society that a thing is valuable or not-valuable and intentionally set a particular price for it. As an obvious example, no one would argue that hospitals in Texas should have been paying the "market rate" for electricity last week, and conversely, it would have been a scandal if someone had been mining bitcoin on the Texas grid, no matter what price they were paying per kWh. A similar thing happens with water, where people are asked not to use their sprinklers during a dry spell. They can _afford_ to buy a lot of water at the market rate, and raising the price might not even change that (besides being super unfair to someone else who then might struggle to afford even enough water to drink). So yeah, I think it's fair for us to say as a society that turning electricity into heat in the form of bitcoin mining is a gigantic and unacceptable waste of a resource that we'd like to use for other things.
    - keymone 6y ago
      > we can decide collectively as a society that a thing is valuable or not-valuable and intentionally set a particular price for it yeah, that's exactly what's happening to bitcoin for last 10 years. > turning electricity into heat in the form of bitcoin mining is a gigantic and unacceptable waste of a resource that we'd like to use for other things first of all, heat is a sign of inefficiency, the better bitcoin mining gets the less heat it will produce. second - it's a gigantic and unacceptable waste of resources in your opinion, personally i very much disagree and think the opposite: decentralized financial security expressed directly in terms of energy required to subvert it is the largest discovery in financial theory since the concept of money itself, it is extremely valuable.
hakesdev 6y ago
If you use a money with an issuance scheme that doesn't derive from pure costs (useless things like hashing), the underlying incentives of that money will seed its own destruction. What happens if you have a coin based on "useful work" and you "solve" the problem you were hoping to solve. Now a lot of "miners" leave the network, presumably because they were only there to help solve that particular problem. Now you have a weak system, and a system subject to 51% attacks by adversarial miners, and therefore not a good money/coin. I don't see how HN commenters (in large part) don't get this. It's the Single-responsibility Principle, just in a different context.
- j-pb 6y ago
  There's plenty of usefull work that we won't run out of. SAT solving is the prime candidate, because we have A LOT of NP hard problems in our day to day lives. Weather simulations are another one, drug research is another one. For the latter I'd argue that if we're at a point where we've erredicated all disease, we've also transcended as a society to a point where money has become obsolete.
  - mtalantikite 6y ago
    Yeah, just last night I was curious about any blockchain approaches that might be out there that try and do something more useful and found people trying to use SAT solving as the base. This paper in particular seemed pretty interesting and I do hope we get to a place where we can at least be working on NP hard problems while transacting on a blockchain: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3297280.3297319 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3297280.3297319
  - VMG 6y ago
    This is besides the point, and the parent didn't quite explain it correctly. If there is no opportunity cost for mining, there is no penalty for mining an invalid chain therefore no security.
    - Robotbeat 6y ago
      There is a penalty for producing an invalid fold. Folds are validated.
jl2718 6y ago
This may be misunderstanding the function of PoW. Bitcoin PoW provides three things: selection, security, and incentive. The compute resource burn is an externality, although, it also ends up providing an important function, economic distribution. For PoW to work,it has to be hard to produce, easy to verify, and most importantly, attest to one and only one state of the blockchain. The last part is where this fails as PoW. The solution to a puzzle is meaningless if the same solution can be shown as the result of two different inputs. So the puzzle must be practically unique to each proposed block (infinite possibilities), and ‘fair’ to each proposal. If you can find a useful puzzle with these properties, please don’t hold back.
- dfgdghdf 6y ago
  Exactly this. The PoW scheme must commit you to a particular chain.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Can you just hash a new solution to the puzzle with the new proposed block?
  - proto-n 6y ago
    Solution has to depend on the proposed block, so that a solution is not reusable for the next block
    - Robotbeat 6y ago
      The solution is also announced in cleartext, so you can check against previous solutions.
      - AgentME 6y ago
        The problem is that when a miner announces a block with a solution, an attacker could immediately announce their own alternative block with the same solution and there would be a chance that the network would take up their block first.
RankingMember 6y ago
Does anyone still own this? It came out awhile back and Bittrex dropped it in like 2018.
- lolIamANoob 6y ago
  A lot of people are still running BOINC and getting Gridcoins in return. The difficulty of staking has increased a lot since 2018.
NonCoder 6y ago
This is one of my favorite cryptocurrencies. The process of solving a real world problem is very useful in the long run.
wyldfire 6y ago
For most cryptocoins, you want a proof-of-work to be: (1) easy for a computer to verify, (2) hard for a computer to perform, (3) impossible to predict for a given 'block' and (4) decentralized and untrusted. If it's a novel scientific problem it won't be all of these. An interesting exception is prime numbers. Primecoin [1] has a useful proof-of-work: it finds Cunningham chains of primes. If you don't like the energy consumed by a proof of work, you should probably use something else like proof of stake. Any clever idea to try and steer the computational power to SETI@home or protein folding won't have the critical qualities of most cryptocoins. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Folding can be verified easier than it can be produced.
  - wyldfire 6y ago
    There's no points for partial credit. It cannot be decentralized, untrusted and unpredictable. If anything other than an automaton produces the PoW inputs, it's at least centralized and we must trust that no one is cheating the PoW.
    - Robotbeat 6y ago
      No points for partial credit?? Well... if you believe that, then that makes Bitcoin suspect as well as its consensus mechanism is essentially already broken by the practical concentration of mining power in a single country with an authoritarian central government. EDIT: Anyone using an online wallet is already compromising trustlessness. Heck, using common software packages that you didn’t personally inspect is also compromising trustlessness. But does this matter in practicality? Yes (such online wallets and even sometimes soft wallets have been compromised or have lost coins occasionally), but not enough to necessarily get rid of all of the utility of cryptocurrency.
  - tromp 6y ago
    You can verify that some fold achieves some energy state. What you cannot efficiently verify is that it's the best possible fold, achieving the global minimum energy.
VMG 6y ago
Proof-of-Work only makes sense if there is an opportunity cost for mining an invalid chain. If mining an invalid chain is "useful" in some way, the security guarantee disappears.
- algo646464 6y ago
  Can you explain why the security guarantee disappears in more detail? I thought that the security of a block-chain comes primarily from the difficulty of rewriting the chain of blocks. To do that you will have to fork and recompute the chain from some point back in history (say 5 blocks ago). This puts at a disadvantage since the rest of the network is ahead of you by 5 blocks and will continue adding new blocks. So you will need a lot of computational power to rewrite history and also overtake the rest of the network. Why would some additional reward for mining (by solving a useful problem) break this?
  - VMG 6y ago
    You don't actually need 51% of the mining power to perform a double-spend attack. Just by pure chance, even with 10% of the mining power, you will find 5 blocks in a row sometimes. With a "wasteful" PoW, miners would not attempt this as they would hemorrhage money doing that. Withe a "useful" PoW, miners could have an outside funding source like some institute that pays for protein folding. The would not lose money in their attempt to produce a minority chain (in proportion to the "usefulness" of their PoW)
    - algo646464 6y ago
      The external reward in "useful" PoW is given to all miners, good and bad. So everyone is equally incentivized. In fact it should actually increase the participation in the network, e.g. those who don't care about cryptocurrency but are interested in the "useful" problem being solved. The external reward by itself provides no competitive advantage. It reduces everyone's costs by the same amount. Rewriting history still remains difficult. So what am I missing here?
      - 6y ago
ashtonkem 6y ago
Whenever a new coin shows up, the only interesting question is whether it’s a scam, a joke, or an earnest yet ridiculous attempt to solve a problem that blockchains in no way solve.
- Forbo 6y ago
  New? Gridcoin has been around since 2013.
jaxslayerv 6y ago
https://birdtraps.com.ng/ https://birdtraps.com.ng/
roboticmind 6y ago
For those that are wondering how this works, Gridcoin uses PoS - not PoW - and then rewards for research on top of it. It is not locked into any algorithm because it's not PoW. There are currently 18 different BOINC project [1] that it rewards. New projects can be voted in or can be voted off. To try to reduce the centralization, there is a system of oracles that gathers the stats from each project and the nodes verify that the oracles match each other. As well, each project only consists of 1/18th of the rewards [2] from research and there's also new coins rewarded for just staking, so if a project acts up, they wouldn't be able to largely manipulate coin supply. If you have any more questions about it, feel free to ask me [1] https://gridcoin.us/guides/whitelist.htm https://gridcoin.us/guides/whitelist.htm [2] https://gridcoin.us/wiki/magnitude.html https://gridcoin.us/wiki/magnitude.html Note: I help work on the gridcoin.us website and have ~5000 Gridcoin, so I may be biased in my view of the coin :)
- noxer 6y ago
  Whats the use for the coin? Its an incentive obviously but its only so because it has a price tag. Who should buy the coin from me if I "mined" one and what would he do with it?
  - deeeeplearning 6y ago
    >Whats the use for the coin? Its an incentive obviously but its only so because it has a price tag. Who should buy the coin from me if I "mined" one and what would he do with it? This is the same for any crypto coin. Certainly not unique to Gridcoin.
    - noxer 6y ago
      That doesn't answer the question.
      - neolefty 6y ago
        It's more a history question than a technical question. What's the use of Bitcoin or Ethereum?
deeeeplearning 6y ago
Not to be that guy but did anyone read the 2 sentence wiki? "Gridcoin attempts to address and ease the environmental energy impact of cryptocurrency mining through its proof-of-research and proof-of-stake protocols" Feels like a quarter of the comments are complaining about PoW ...
- jl2718 6y ago
  Because it doesn’t ‘address’ any of that. It’ vanilla PoS. Still a good idea for other reasons.
  - deeeeplearning 6y ago
    So what's the point of complaining about PoW as if Gridcoin used that when literally 1 of the 2 sentences in the wiki says it uses PoS?
dang 6y ago
If curious, past threads: Help Take the Fight to COVID-19 with BOINC and Folding@Home - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22658139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22658139 - March 2020 (61 comments) Gridcoin: Rewarding Scientific Distributed Computing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16031912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16031912 - Dec 2017 (55 comments) BOINC – Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12524921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12524921 - Sept 2016 (21 comments) BOINC: Compute for Science - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10205904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10205904 - Sept 2015 (11 comments) Help advance science while mining cryptocurrency - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8102623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8102623 - July 2014 (1 comment)
- roboticmind 6y ago
  For those reading and not familiar with Gridcoin and BOINC, I should note that BOINC is separate from Gridcoin. The threads about BOINC are indeed related, but about a slightly different topic. Just wanted to note that since I have seen some confusion stemming from it in the past Separately, would it be possible to change the submission link to something with a little more information such as gridcoin.us? I have been lurking for a few months and I notice that you have changed some links in the past. Not sure what the guidelines are for changing links, so let me know if me that's not something you think is needed or can do
  - dang 6y ago
    Yes, URL changed now from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridcoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridcoin. I wish I had thought of that (or seen your comment) sooner!
bunkydoo 6y ago
Well, one area that Gridcoin isn't / hasn't been availed for is the fact that it (like folding@home) has projects that helped do research on COVID. Although folding@home didn't provide any monetary reward - at least Rosetta@home is a supported GRC project. Obviously the token price would need to be higher to make the break even cost of the servers & mining feasible, but it is a neat project.
RootKitBeerCat 6y ago
The whole point of Bitcoin is that attacking it is costly... don’t fall prey to these cash grab pump and dump projects. Buy Bitcoin or monero.
dang 6y ago
Url changed from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridcoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridcoin, which has almost no information.
normalocity 6y ago
This seems like a great way to get fools to trade something valuable (the electricity they pay for to run arbitrary computation) for something worthless (a new crypto currency). If you think of electricity as fuel for computers, similar to fuel for a semi, then this scheme seems analogous to an attempt to get truck drivers to drive your stuff to it's destination at their upfront cost in exchange for an IOU that has no backing.

230 points by guerrilla 6y ago

I actually emailed someone at BOINC in July 2015 regarding exactly this, I see the paper came out in December 2015 with the idea. Glad to see it finally becoming a reality.

foobarbecue 6y ago
Gridcoin was launched on October 16, 2013 https://gridcoin.us/wiki/ https://gridcoin.us/wiki/

stonesweep 6y ago

I tried out Gridcoin a few years back in it's $0.05 days, its at ~$0.01 now - at the time you had to "buy in" about $100 USD to have enough collateral to work solo (stake to get credit rewards), otherwise you had to join a mining pool to just get paid your meager credits. A basic $5 cloud server cannot generate enough GRC credit to pay for itself at 5 cents.

gruez 6y ago
>A basic $5 cloud server cannot generate enough GRC credit to pay for itself at 5 cents. This is totally expected because of how the economics of mining works. If it were profitable to mine with a $5 cloud server then everybody would jump on, difficulty would increase, and it wouldn't be profitable anymore. The miners you're competing against are hobbyists with much cheaper access to compute than you, eg. they've already bought a threadripper workstation for work related purposes and they're just using the spare cycles.
- stonesweep 6y ago
  > profitable ...I'd settle for "break even" and have it simply pay for itself to perform the scientific work. My personal choice is to participate in the World Community Grid and I tried everything from a cloud server to a 20-core dual E5-2660v2 (rented) and even that amount of power cannot pay for it's monthly (super cheap, $75) rental fees. A laptop with an i5-3320 (something like that) cannot even pay for it's electricity use generating GRC. Not profitable, just break even - that's all a guy like me asks for; it's more efficient if I take cold hard cash and donate it to a comparable cause than it does to run WCG nodes and expect GRC to just cover the electricity cost, ignore the hardware. I don't want to be profitable, just have any rig pay for it's electricity use - that's it. GRC cannot even cover that spread in finances.
- maerF0x0 6y ago
  > profitable Similar to what stonesweep said, some people have different economics. For example, I have an old computer sitting around. And my home heats by electricity in the winter. Therefore any time I need to heat my home it's 0 marginal cost to instead do mining (of any kind). IMO this is the real future of green efficiency, finding the places where the energy was already "spent" on a high value task, and add a low value task in the chain. Another example could be server farms could water cool and use waste heat for elec generation, low temp plastic melting, or residential hot water...

Forbo 6y ago

I've been trying to bring attention to this project for years. It directly addresses the whole "proof of work is proof of waste" problem. Some of my earliest submissions to HN were about GridCoin, and they largely went compeletely ignored, glad to finally see it on the front page. At least with BOINC you end up with something more worthwhile than just bruteforcing hashes.

3np 6y ago
Same, I even bought some back in... 2014 I think? I'm yet ambivalent on if it's a factor on why it hasn't been able to attract serious attention, but I've heard the argument that doing calculations that have external value outside of PoW breaks the incentive mechanisms. To me, merge mining on Bitcoin[0] and MEV on Ethereum[1] are evidence against that argument, since we already have those forces in play today. So Gridcoins concept should work. [0]: https://blog.bitmex.com/the-growth-of-bitcoin-merge-mining/ https://blog.bitmex.com/the-growth-of-bitcoin-merge-mining/ [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.05234 https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.05234
hakesdev 6y ago
If you use a money with an issuance scheme that doesn't derive from pure costs (useless things like hashing), the underlying incentives of that money will seed its own destruction. What happens if you have a coin based on "useful work" and you "solve" the problem you were hoping to solve. Now a lot of "miners" leave the network, presumably because they were only there to help solve that particular problem. Now you have a weak system, and a system subject to 51% attacks by adversarial miners, and therefore not a good money/coin. I don't see how HN commenters (in large part) don't get this. It's the Single-responsibility Principle, just in a different context.
- Forbo 6y ago
  Considering the number of supercomputers that have been constructed since the days of ENIAC, I don't think we'll be running out of scientific computing problems any time soon. And if we somehow do manage to run out of computing problems, then I guess we've already succeeded.

Kiro 6y ago

How is it verified? I thought the problem with doing useful work instead of normal PoW was that producing and verifying are equally hard, while Bitcoin's PoW scheme is hard to produce but easy to verify (so other miners can easily see that you've actually found the hash without doing any computations themselves).

Forbo 6y ago
Even if you have people doubling or tripling up the work on something useful, the end result is infinitely more useful than bruteforced hashes.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dnautics 6y ago
  Don't forget that the usefulness of brute forced hashes is that it lets you have decentralized trust, so, you may be off by a factor of infinity.
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    Decentralized trust on Bitcoin is an illusion in practicality. There are trust bottlenecks all over the place when most people go to use it. It’s ultimately a quixotic goal. So compromising a bit on mathematical decentralized trustlessness to accomplish some of the other goals of cryptocurrency while addressing the massive waste is a valid goal IMHO.
Robotbeat 6y ago
Folding can be and is verified, however.
neolefty 6y ago
It depends on out-of-loop review of the oracles by people, to ensure they stay honest, and that new oracles are honest. Over time, as problems come and go, I assume oracles will be added and retired, so this coin will require manual maintenance. A necessary cost of being interesting?

david_draco 6y ago

How can regulations can make alternative, less climate-harming projects such as this more attractive over bitcoin? Would crypto-currency income taxes or perhaps data center laws (similar to cyber-crime laws) be a useful tool? Or would that only favor lightning networks/PoS and those not declaring earnings.

keymone 6y ago
Your aim is off, bitcoin using energy is fine just like any other use of energy is fine, part of the free market of ebergy. It’s production of energy from fossil fuels that isn’t fine.
- mikepurvis 6y ago
  I don't think that's really true. There are plenty of cases where we can decide collectively as a society that a thing is valuable or not-valuable and intentionally set a particular price for it. As an obvious example, no one would argue that hospitals in Texas should have been paying the "market rate" for electricity last week, and conversely, it would have been a scandal if someone had been mining bitcoin on the Texas grid, no matter what price they were paying per kWh. A similar thing happens with water, where people are asked not to use their sprinklers during a dry spell. They can _afford_ to buy a lot of water at the market rate, and raising the price might not even change that (besides being super unfair to someone else who then might struggle to afford even enough water to drink). So yeah, I think it's fair for us to say as a society that turning electricity into heat in the form of bitcoin mining is a gigantic and unacceptable waste of a resource that we'd like to use for other things.
  - keymone 6y ago
    > we can decide collectively as a society that a thing is valuable or not-valuable and intentionally set a particular price for it yeah, that's exactly what's happening to bitcoin for last 10 years. > turning electricity into heat in the form of bitcoin mining is a gigantic and unacceptable waste of a resource that we'd like to use for other things first of all, heat is a sign of inefficiency, the better bitcoin mining gets the less heat it will produce. second - it's a gigantic and unacceptable waste of resources in your opinion, personally i very much disagree and think the opposite: decentralized financial security expressed directly in terms of energy required to subvert it is the largest discovery in financial theory since the concept of money itself, it is extremely valuable.

hakesdev 6y ago

If you use a money with an issuance scheme that doesn't derive from pure costs (useless things like hashing), the underlying incentives of that money will seed its own destruction. What happens if you have a coin based on "useful work" and you "solve" the problem you were hoping to solve. Now a lot of "miners" leave the network, presumably because they were only there to help solve that particular problem. Now you have a weak system, and a system subject to 51% attacks by adversarial miners, and therefore not a good money/coin. I don't see how HN commenters (in large part) don't get this. It's the Single-responsibility Principle, just in a different context.

j-pb 6y ago
There's plenty of usefull work that we won't run out of. SAT solving is the prime candidate, because we have A LOT of NP hard problems in our day to day lives. Weather simulations are another one, drug research is another one. For the latter I'd argue that if we're at a point where we've erredicated all disease, we've also transcended as a society to a point where money has become obsolete.
- mtalantikite 6y ago
  Yeah, just last night I was curious about any blockchain approaches that might be out there that try and do something more useful and found people trying to use SAT solving as the base. This paper in particular seemed pretty interesting and I do hope we get to a place where we can at least be working on NP hard problems while transacting on a blockchain: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3297280.3297319 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3297280.3297319
- VMG 6y ago
  This is besides the point, and the parent didn't quite explain it correctly. If there is no opportunity cost for mining, there is no penalty for mining an invalid chain therefore no security.
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    There is a penalty for producing an invalid fold. Folds are validated.

jl2718 6y ago

This may be misunderstanding the function of PoW. Bitcoin PoW provides three things: selection, security, and incentive. The compute resource burn is an externality, although, it also ends up providing an important function, economic distribution. For PoW to work,it has to be hard to produce, easy to verify, and most importantly, attest to one and only one state of the blockchain. The last part is where this fails as PoW. The solution to a puzzle is meaningless if the same solution can be shown as the result of two different inputs. So the puzzle must be practically unique to each proposed block (infinite possibilities), and ‘fair’ to each proposal. If you can find a useful puzzle with these properties, please don’t hold back.

dfgdghdf 6y ago
Exactly this. The PoW scheme must commit you to a particular chain.
Robotbeat 6y ago
Can you just hash a new solution to the puzzle with the new proposed block?
- proto-n 6y ago
  Solution has to depend on the proposed block, so that a solution is not reusable for the next block
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    The solution is also announced in cleartext, so you can check against previous solutions.
    - AgentME 6y ago
      The problem is that when a miner announces a block with a solution, an attacker could immediately announce their own alternative block with the same solution and there would be a chance that the network would take up their block first.

RankingMember 6y ago

Does anyone still own this? It came out awhile back and Bittrex dropped it in like 2018.

lolIamANoob 6y ago
A lot of people are still running BOINC and getting Gridcoins in return. The difficulty of staking has increased a lot since 2018.

NonCoder 6y ago

This is one of my favorite cryptocurrencies. The process of solving a real world problem is very useful in the long run.

wyldfire 6y ago

For most cryptocoins, you want a proof-of-work to be: (1) easy for a computer to verify, (2) hard for a computer to perform, (3) impossible to predict for a given 'block' and (4) decentralized and untrusted. If it's a novel scientific problem it won't be all of these. An interesting exception is prime numbers. Primecoin [1] has a useful proof-of-work: it finds Cunningham chains of primes. If you don't like the energy consumed by a proof of work, you should probably use something else like proof of stake. Any clever idea to try and steer the computational power to SETI@home or protein folding won't have the critical qualities of most cryptocoins. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin

Robotbeat 6y ago
Folding can be verified easier than it can be produced.
- wyldfire 6y ago
  There's no points for partial credit. It cannot be decentralized, untrusted and unpredictable. If anything other than an automaton produces the PoW inputs, it's at least centralized and we must trust that no one is cheating the PoW.
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    No points for partial credit?? Well... if you believe that, then that makes Bitcoin suspect as well as its consensus mechanism is essentially already broken by the practical concentration of mining power in a single country with an authoritarian central government. EDIT: Anyone using an online wallet is already compromising trustlessness. Heck, using common software packages that you didn’t personally inspect is also compromising trustlessness. But does this matter in practicality? Yes (such online wallets and even sometimes soft wallets have been compromised or have lost coins occasionally), but not enough to necessarily get rid of all of the utility of cryptocurrency.
- tromp 6y ago
  You can verify that some fold achieves some energy state. What you cannot efficiently verify is that it's the best possible fold, achieving the global minimum energy.

VMG 6y ago

Proof-of-Work only makes sense if there is an opportunity cost for mining an invalid chain. If mining an invalid chain is "useful" in some way, the security guarantee disappears.

algo646464 6y ago
Can you explain why the security guarantee disappears in more detail? I thought that the security of a block-chain comes primarily from the difficulty of rewriting the chain of blocks. To do that you will have to fork and recompute the chain from some point back in history (say 5 blocks ago). This puts at a disadvantage since the rest of the network is ahead of you by 5 blocks and will continue adding new blocks. So you will need a lot of computational power to rewrite history and also overtake the rest of the network. Why would some additional reward for mining (by solving a useful problem) break this?
- VMG 6y ago
  You don't actually need 51% of the mining power to perform a double-spend attack. Just by pure chance, even with 10% of the mining power, you will find 5 blocks in a row sometimes. With a "wasteful" PoW, miners would not attempt this as they would hemorrhage money doing that. Withe a "useful" PoW, miners could have an outside funding source like some institute that pays for protein folding. The would not lose money in their attempt to produce a minority chain (in proportion to the "usefulness" of their PoW)
  - algo646464 6y ago
    The external reward in "useful" PoW is given to all miners, good and bad. So everyone is equally incentivized. In fact it should actually increase the participation in the network, e.g. those who don't care about cryptocurrency but are interested in the "useful" problem being solved. The external reward by itself provides no competitive advantage. It reduces everyone's costs by the same amount. Rewriting history still remains difficult. So what am I missing here?
    - 6y ago

ashtonkem 6y ago

Whenever a new coin shows up, the only interesting question is whether it’s a scam, a joke, or an earnest yet ridiculous attempt to solve a problem that blockchains in no way solve.

Forbo 6y ago
New? Gridcoin has been around since 2013.

jaxslayerv 6y ago

https://birdtraps.com.ng/ https://birdtraps.com.ng/

roboticmind 6y ago

For those that are wondering how this works, Gridcoin uses PoS - not PoW - and then rewards for research on top of it. It is not locked into any algorithm because it's not PoW. There are currently 18 different BOINC project [1] that it rewards. New projects can be voted in or can be voted off. To try to reduce the centralization, there is a system of oracles that gathers the stats from each project and the nodes verify that the oracles match each other. As well, each project only consists of 1/18th of the rewards [2] from research and there's also new coins rewarded for just staking, so if a project acts up, they wouldn't be able to largely manipulate coin supply. If you have any more questions about it, feel free to ask me [1] https://gridcoin.us/guides/whitelist.htm https://gridcoin.us/guides/whitelist.htm [2] https://gridcoin.us/wiki/magnitude.html https://gridcoin.us/wiki/magnitude.html Note: I help work on the gridcoin.us website and have ~5000 Gridcoin, so I may be biased in my view of the coin :)

noxer 6y ago
Whats the use for the coin? Its an incentive obviously but its only so because it has a price tag. Who should buy the coin from me if I "mined" one and what would he do with it?
- deeeeplearning 6y ago
  >Whats the use for the coin? Its an incentive obviously but its only so because it has a price tag. Who should buy the coin from me if I "mined" one and what would he do with it? This is the same for any crypto coin. Certainly not unique to Gridcoin.
  - noxer 6y ago
    That doesn't answer the question.
    - neolefty 6y ago
      It's more a history question than a technical question. What's the use of Bitcoin or Ethereum?

deeeeplearning 6y ago

Not to be that guy but did anyone read the 2 sentence wiki? "Gridcoin attempts to address and ease the environmental energy impact of cryptocurrency mining through its proof-of-research and proof-of-stake protocols" Feels like a quarter of the comments are complaining about PoW ...

jl2718 6y ago
Because it doesn’t ‘address’ any of that. It’ vanilla PoS. Still a good idea for other reasons.
- deeeeplearning 6y ago
  So what's the point of complaining about PoW as if Gridcoin used that when literally 1 of the 2 sentences in the wiki says it uses PoS?

dang 6y ago

If curious, past threads: Help Take the Fight to COVID-19 with BOINC and Folding@Home - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22658139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22658139 - March 2020 (61 comments) Gridcoin: Rewarding Scientific Distributed Computing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16031912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16031912 - Dec 2017 (55 comments) BOINC – Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12524921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12524921 - Sept 2016 (21 comments) BOINC: Compute for Science - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10205904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10205904 - Sept 2015 (11 comments) Help advance science while mining cryptocurrency - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8102623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8102623 - July 2014 (1 comment)

roboticmind 6y ago
For those reading and not familiar with Gridcoin and BOINC, I should note that BOINC is separate from Gridcoin. The threads about BOINC are indeed related, but about a slightly different topic. Just wanted to note that since I have seen some confusion stemming from it in the past Separately, would it be possible to change the submission link to something with a little more information such as gridcoin.us? I have been lurking for a few months and I notice that you have changed some links in the past. Not sure what the guidelines are for changing links, so let me know if me that's not something you think is needed or can do
- dang 6y ago
  Yes, URL changed now from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridcoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridcoin. I wish I had thought of that (or seen your comment) sooner!

bunkydoo 6y ago

Well, one area that Gridcoin isn't / hasn't been availed for is the fact that it (like folding@home) has projects that helped do research on COVID. Although folding@home didn't provide any monetary reward - at least Rosetta@home is a supported GRC project. Obviously the token price would need to be higher to make the break even cost of the servers & mining feasible, but it is a neat project.

RootKitBeerCat 6y ago

The whole point of Bitcoin is that attacking it is costly... don’t fall prey to these cash grab pump and dump projects. Buy Bitcoin or monero.

dang 6y ago

Url changed from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridcoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridcoin, which has almost no information.

normalocity 6y ago

This seems like a great way to get fools to trade something valuable (the electricity they pay for to run arbitrary computation) for something worthless (a new crypto currency). If you think of electricity as fuel for computers, similar to fuel for a semi, then this scheme seems analogous to an attempt to get truck drivers to drive your stuff to it's destination at their upfront cost in exchange for an IOU that has no backing.