7 ms·

Gridcoin: a simple investment thesis

65 points by didier4 6y ago

SkipperCat 6y ago
Sometimes I wonder if these articles are real or from The Onion. Why would someone doing research want to integrate something that literally makes a penny (1 GRD == 0.010754 USD). The real money is in grants. Write up a good grant proposal and you can get tens of thousands of dollars. I'm not the biggest fan of crypto, but I do acknowledge its success in certain areas. I'm just puzzled why so many people think its the solution to every problem.
- roboticmind 6y ago
  I think you may be missing what Gridcoin is doing. It is not going to the scientists themselves, but the people using their computers to help scientists. As well, I believe many of the projects Gridcoin rewards are grant funded (separate from Gridcoin) Note: I have around 5000 Gridcoin, so I may be biased in my view of the coin :)
  - Ozzie_osman 6y ago
    > Note: I have around 5000 Gridcoin, so I may be biased in my view of the coin :) This is one issue with crypto. It's hard to tell whether people hyping it own it because you believe in it or whether you believe in it because you own it.
    - desmond373 6y ago
      I think the best solution is to not take anothers word for for its worth. Have a look at the system itself and tackle the issue of whether it benefits society/yourself/Group You Like, or not. I also mine Gridcoin. I don't know how much I have ATM, but I like that even when I'm away living my life, in some small part I'm helping a scientist find something new. The reward is just there to help with on boarding in my mind. If the coin ever jumped in price and a few miners see it as an investment, well hey its better than mining bitcoin and producing less useful data.
    - ant6n 6y ago
      Another problem is whether you believe you own anything that exists, or whether you just participate in some shared belief in its existence.
    - roboticmind 6y ago
      I agree with the other commenters that the best way to get an idea of it is to look at it yourself. It's hard to trust people in general, so that's why I left it in for more transparency. I think that's an issue that goes to more than just crypto too unfortunately. I'd agree that it's worse in the crypto world in general, however. If you want some degree of evidence that I believe in the coin, you can take a look at some of the work I've done[1][2]. None of this can tell you anything with high confidence unfortunately with out any real knowledge of each other, so the best solution is not to take my complete word on everything. Most of the work I've done is on the site and wiki system (208 commits)[1], and I've done a little bit on the wallet itself (19 commits)[2], but my C++ abilities aren't the best, so not as much as the site. Lastly, 5000 Gridcoin is really not a lot in comparison to most of the network, but still of course raises potential conflicts of interests. I know that it's still hard to trust anyone on this because there's a lot of shill type people in the crypto world unfortunately, so it's best to look at the system itself [1] https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Gridcoin-Site/graphs/contributors https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Gridcoin-Site/graphs/c... [2] https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Gridcoin-Research/graphs/contributors https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Gridcoin-Research/grap...
    - scotty79 6y ago
      > It's hard to tell whether people hyping it own it because you believe in it or whether you believe in it because you own it. Why does it matter? It shouldn't if you look at their arguments.
    - freewilly1040 6y ago
      It’s usually not that hard to tell.
- nathias 6y ago
  it's not competing with grant but the voluntary BOINC work ... I think Gridcoin is one of the few great projects, of a direction in crypto that is imo underappreciated, where proof of work would actually be doing useful work
  - noxer 6y ago
    Its not competing, it prints money to reward people for voluntary work. Witch attracts people who would not do the voluntary work. And it attracts gamblers who throw real money at it in hope of price gains. So essentially it gives money from gamblers to "voluntaries" although very very likely the gamblers and the "voluntaries" are mostly the same people. So its basically just screwing over gamblers with the pitch that their loses are used for something somewhat useful. While at the same time some small group of people probably enriched themself along the way.
    - nathias 6y ago
      How is it screwing over the gamblers? Why would it be a problem if people got rich?
      - noxer 6y ago
        Why would they get rich if they give money to pay people for research in exchanges for worthless tokens? The research, even if it leads to something good for humans, does not add any value to the token. The token only has a value because gamblers speculate on a higher price in the future. The higher price can only be reached if more new gambler speculates on an even higher price and so on. We have a finite amount of gamblers so this can not go on forever and make everyone rich. Instead each wave of new gamblers makes the previous rich. But each wave has to be larger which untimely means the last and largest wave will be screwed over. Which Im totally fine with as long as people know the risk of being that last wave. The problem is on the side line there are people who never risked to be in that last wave because they simply printed the tokens and sold it. Like for example the devs that paid themself with these tokens thus inflating the supply which basically steals value form everyone who holds the token.
nuclx 6y ago
I assume the tech behind this is brittle in that Proof of Research "miners" are assumed to be trusted in that they don't just lie to the BOINC servers about what work they actually performed.
- roboticmind 6y ago
  The BOINC projects run checks on the work a user submit. Usually it involves sending out the same work to two random different people and seeing if they match
  - tphyahoo2 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
    - roboticmind 6y ago
      If someone has the level of processing power to get a majority of a project's tasks, I think it would go very quickly noticed, and the project admin can just up their task validation higher making it much harder (e.g send to 4 random clients instead of 2). If they were to try to abort a bunch of the work, it would almost certainly get detected automatically by the project's spam protections and they would get less work sent to the point of no work if they do it too much. As well you'd have to pick only a single project which only accounts for 1/19th (currently) of Gridcoin research rewards. Seems easier to just do things legitimately if you have that level of power The main way you could really pull anything like that off is through a bugs or miss-configurations on where work is sent, which did happen once on a single project that messed up how work was sent, but was fixed rather quickly before they ever got any Gridcoin. As well, Gridcoin incentivizes people to look out for it since they are competing against any cheaters. If a project didn't respond to any attempts to do this, they can also be removed from the whitelisted projects on Gridcoin if needed For some comparison points about the level of power you'd need without any bugs, Rosetta@Home has 327,525 tasks currently running in place with an estimated ~370 terraflops of power[1]. Now Rosetta@Home is one of the more competitive projects due interest in their COVID-19 work, but overall there's still a lot of computing power in BOINC and from people earning Gridcoin for running BOINC. I believe there's more to the verification system, but my that's current understanding of it. [1] https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/server_status.php https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/server_status.php
stonesweep 6y ago
Previous thread about GRC from ~37 days ago, same conversations starting here already tackled there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26236325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26236325
- noxer 6y ago
  According to an involved dev the coin has no use case at all. Its printed money to act as incentive/reward for doing something no one would actually pay for. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238962
  - roboticmind 6y ago
    That is not what I said at all. Those are your own words. I've already explained in that thread why the "no one would actually pay for" part is false as well, and you are mixing up different things here. No new coins are minted for development, and that is not the primary purpose of Gridcoin at all. Additionally many people do and have run BOINC (what Gridcoin is minted in reward for) without getting any compensation. BOINC existed for 10 years before Gridcoin did. Further your definition of use case is very different from mine as for instance it excludes for instance using it as a currency for transactions. From what I understand of your definition, you view almost all cryptocurrencies as without any use case. This is different than what it comes across as saying to others here about Gridcoin. As well I don't work on the coin directly - mostly on the site and wiki. I wouldn't call myself a dev on the coin. As well I haven't requested any Gridcoin from anyone for the work I do on the site if you wanted to talk about the "no one would actually pay for" part of development. You have continued to say false things about the coin and more and it is quite frankly ticking me off. I'm not normally this frustrated in my responses, but you have continued to pushed my buttons. I'm not continuing this discussion, but just want to clarify for any others reading this.
    - noxer 6y ago
      You could not name a single use case in the whole discussion. So there is none. That statement is correct until proven otherwise. The burden of proof lies with you.
monkeydust 6y ago
Gridcoin and PowerLedger two of my favorite crypto projects as there is a tangible benefit to both (IMHO).
ant6n 6y ago
When I first heard of Bitcoin like ten years ago, I thought it worked like Gridcoin - that the computation was something useful and the coin a sort of virtual reward. Oh well.
px43 6y ago
Gridcoin is great. I originally got into Bitcoin mining in 2009, largely because of my previous involvement with SETI@Home, Folding@Home, etc, so BOINC has a special place in my heart as a project. The thing is though, the long term economic viability of GRC is basically zero, simply due to the fact that it essentially allows anyone who runs any of these BOINC projects to print money for themselves. This is a generic problem across the various projects that try to do this sort of "proof of science" type approach. Whoever controls the dataset being crunched essentially controls monetary supply. It's very hard to come up with a useful problem for people to crunch on which is provably fair, which is why Bitcoin just hashes random nonces. Of course these markets are irrational, look where DOGE was able to get, so maybe GRC goes 10000x and everyone gets a Yacht, but as the total market cap increases, the likelihood of bad actors in the system goes up as well, and GRC is fundamentally defenseless against this type of attack. That said, it's an awesome project, and IMO earning GRC is quite a bit more fun than watching your numbers go up on some website's scoreboard. If you want to show your support for BOINC miners, by all means, buy up stacks of GRC, just don't expect massive returns from it.
- roboticmind 6y ago
  It's worth noting that one project only accounts for 1/19th of the current rewards for research and 0 of the rewards for staking. They do not have near complete control of the monetary supply. As well, as more projects are added to the whitelist that 1/19 fraction grows smaller Additionally if a project were to try to manipulate things, it's hard to do anything on a large scale without it being noticed. With it being noticed, a poll would almost certainly come up and get voted yes on to remove the project from the whitelist. In terms of those who gather stats from those projects, it requires at least 60% rounded up of the scrapers (who pull the stats) to exactly match. This is currently 4/6 although there will likely be more scrapers in the future. You'd have to collude with multiple people, and in a way that could also be easily detected from anyone cross comparing stats on BOINC and stats on Gridcoin. For the last part, yeah, it's for the science, and not for the money for me anyway. The Gridcoin I get for it is just a nice bonus
Ecstatify 6y ago
All articles about crypto should be banned on HN unless the author posts about any position they have in the coin. Influencers have to acknowledge when they’re promoting a product, it should be the same for all crypto.
- space_rock 6y ago
  Jump on the musical chairs scam and see if you make some money. Either way the crim posting this article is going to make money
- jobigoud 6y ago
  Should it be the same for articles about tech companies? Or about the economy in general if you own some index ETF?
  - Ecstatify 6y ago
    In the article he's explicitly talking about an "investment thesis". If I wrote articles like below I should explicitly state my investment. "Why gold is a great investment" "Why You should invest in Tesla" "The Ark Space Exploration & Innovation ETF (NYSE: ARKX) is the future" If your objective is to get your readers to do something that could financially benefit you then you should make that clear. I noticed that some financial podcasts even have a disclaimer at the start of their podcast. --------------------------------------------------- Sorry I should have clarified in my original comment and said all articles shilling some coin

65 points by didier4 6y ago

Sometimes I wonder if these articles are real or from The Onion. Why would someone doing research want to integrate something that literally makes a penny (1 GRD == 0.010754 USD). The real money is in grants. Write up a good grant proposal and you can get tens of thousands of dollars. I'm not the biggest fan of crypto, but I do acknowledge its success in certain areas. I'm just puzzled why so many people think its the solution to every problem.

roboticmind 6y ago
I think you may be missing what Gridcoin is doing. It is not going to the scientists themselves, but the people using their computers to help scientists. As well, I believe many of the projects Gridcoin rewards are grant funded (separate from Gridcoin) Note: I have around 5000 Gridcoin, so I may be biased in my view of the coin :)
- Ozzie_osman 6y ago
  > Note: I have around 5000 Gridcoin, so I may be biased in my view of the coin :) This is one issue with crypto. It's hard to tell whether people hyping it own it because you believe in it or whether you believe in it because you own it.
  - desmond373 6y ago
    I think the best solution is to not take anothers word for for its worth. Have a look at the system itself and tackle the issue of whether it benefits society/yourself/Group You Like, or not. I also mine Gridcoin. I don't know how much I have ATM, but I like that even when I'm away living my life, in some small part I'm helping a scientist find something new. The reward is just there to help with on boarding in my mind. If the coin ever jumped in price and a few miners see it as an investment, well hey its better than mining bitcoin and producing less useful data.
  - ant6n 6y ago
    Another problem is whether you believe you own anything that exists, or whether you just participate in some shared belief in its existence.
  - roboticmind 6y ago
    I agree with the other commenters that the best way to get an idea of it is to look at it yourself. It's hard to trust people in general, so that's why I left it in for more transparency. I think that's an issue that goes to more than just crypto too unfortunately. I'd agree that it's worse in the crypto world in general, however. If you want some degree of evidence that I believe in the coin, you can take a look at some of the work I've done[1][2]. None of this can tell you anything with high confidence unfortunately with out any real knowledge of each other, so the best solution is not to take my complete word on everything. Most of the work I've done is on the site and wiki system (208 commits)[1], and I've done a little bit on the wallet itself (19 commits)[2], but my C++ abilities aren't the best, so not as much as the site. Lastly, 5000 Gridcoin is really not a lot in comparison to most of the network, but still of course raises potential conflicts of interests. I know that it's still hard to trust anyone on this because there's a lot of shill type people in the crypto world unfortunately, so it's best to look at the system itself [1] https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Gridcoin-Site/graphs/contributors https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Gridcoin-Site/graphs/c... [2] https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Gridcoin-Research/graphs/contributors https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Gridcoin-Research/grap...
  - scotty79 6y ago
    > It's hard to tell whether people hyping it own it because you believe in it or whether you believe in it because you own it. Why does it matter? It shouldn't if you look at their arguments.
  - freewilly1040 6y ago
    It’s usually not that hard to tell.
nathias 6y ago
it's not competing with grant but the voluntary BOINC work ... I think Gridcoin is one of the few great projects, of a direction in crypto that is imo underappreciated, where proof of work would actually be doing useful work
- noxer 6y ago
  Its not competing, it prints money to reward people for voluntary work. Witch attracts people who would not do the voluntary work. And it attracts gamblers who throw real money at it in hope of price gains. So essentially it gives money from gamblers to "voluntaries" although very very likely the gamblers and the "voluntaries" are mostly the same people. So its basically just screwing over gamblers with the pitch that their loses are used for something somewhat useful. While at the same time some small group of people probably enriched themself along the way.
  - nathias 6y ago
    How is it screwing over the gamblers? Why would it be a problem if people got rich?
    - noxer 6y ago
      Why would they get rich if they give money to pay people for research in exchanges for worthless tokens? The research, even if it leads to something good for humans, does not add any value to the token. The token only has a value because gamblers speculate on a higher price in the future. The higher price can only be reached if more new gambler speculates on an even higher price and so on. We have a finite amount of gamblers so this can not go on forever and make everyone rich. Instead each wave of new gamblers makes the previous rich. But each wave has to be larger which untimely means the last and largest wave will be screwed over. Which Im totally fine with as long as people know the risk of being that last wave. The problem is on the side line there are people who never risked to be in that last wave because they simply printed the tokens and sold it. Like for example the devs that paid themself with these tokens thus inflating the supply which basically steals value form everyone who holds the token.

nuclx 6y ago

I assume the tech behind this is brittle in that Proof of Research "miners" are assumed to be trusted in that they don't just lie to the BOINC servers about what work they actually performed.

roboticmind 6y ago
The BOINC projects run checks on the work a user submit. Usually it involves sending out the same work to two random different people and seeing if they match
- tphyahoo2 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
  - roboticmind 6y ago
    If someone has the level of processing power to get a majority of a project's tasks, I think it would go very quickly noticed, and the project admin can just up their task validation higher making it much harder (e.g send to 4 random clients instead of 2). If they were to try to abort a bunch of the work, it would almost certainly get detected automatically by the project's spam protections and they would get less work sent to the point of no work if they do it too much. As well you'd have to pick only a single project which only accounts for 1/19th (currently) of Gridcoin research rewards. Seems easier to just do things legitimately if you have that level of power The main way you could really pull anything like that off is through a bugs or miss-configurations on where work is sent, which did happen once on a single project that messed up how work was sent, but was fixed rather quickly before they ever got any Gridcoin. As well, Gridcoin incentivizes people to look out for it since they are competing against any cheaters. If a project didn't respond to any attempts to do this, they can also be removed from the whitelisted projects on Gridcoin if needed For some comparison points about the level of power you'd need without any bugs, Rosetta@Home has 327,525 tasks currently running in place with an estimated ~370 terraflops of power[1]. Now Rosetta@Home is one of the more competitive projects due interest in their COVID-19 work, but overall there's still a lot of computing power in BOINC and from people earning Gridcoin for running BOINC. I believe there's more to the verification system, but my that's current understanding of it. [1] https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/server_status.php https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/server_status.php

stonesweep 6y ago

Previous thread about GRC from ~37 days ago, same conversations starting here already tackled there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26236325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26236325

noxer 6y ago
According to an involved dev the coin has no use case at all. Its printed money to act as incentive/reward for doing something no one would actually pay for. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238962
- roboticmind 6y ago
  That is not what I said at all. Those are your own words. I've already explained in that thread why the "no one would actually pay for" part is false as well, and you are mixing up different things here. No new coins are minted for development, and that is not the primary purpose of Gridcoin at all. Additionally many people do and have run BOINC (what Gridcoin is minted in reward for) without getting any compensation. BOINC existed for 10 years before Gridcoin did. Further your definition of use case is very different from mine as for instance it excludes for instance using it as a currency for transactions. From what I understand of your definition, you view almost all cryptocurrencies as without any use case. This is different than what it comes across as saying to others here about Gridcoin. As well I don't work on the coin directly - mostly on the site and wiki. I wouldn't call myself a dev on the coin. As well I haven't requested any Gridcoin from anyone for the work I do on the site if you wanted to talk about the "no one would actually pay for" part of development. You have continued to say false things about the coin and more and it is quite frankly ticking me off. I'm not normally this frustrated in my responses, but you have continued to pushed my buttons. I'm not continuing this discussion, but just want to clarify for any others reading this.
  - noxer 6y ago
    You could not name a single use case in the whole discussion. So there is none. That statement is correct until proven otherwise. The burden of proof lies with you.

monkeydust 6y ago

Gridcoin and PowerLedger two of my favorite crypto projects as there is a tangible benefit to both (IMHO).

ant6n 6y ago

When I first heard of Bitcoin like ten years ago, I thought it worked like Gridcoin - that the computation was something useful and the coin a sort of virtual reward. Oh well.

px43 6y ago

Gridcoin is great. I originally got into Bitcoin mining in 2009, largely because of my previous involvement with SETI@Home, Folding@Home, etc, so BOINC has a special place in my heart as a project. The thing is though, the long term economic viability of GRC is basically zero, simply due to the fact that it essentially allows anyone who runs any of these BOINC projects to print money for themselves. This is a generic problem across the various projects that try to do this sort of "proof of science" type approach. Whoever controls the dataset being crunched essentially controls monetary supply. It's very hard to come up with a useful problem for people to crunch on which is provably fair, which is why Bitcoin just hashes random nonces. Of course these markets are irrational, look where DOGE was able to get, so maybe GRC goes 10000x and everyone gets a Yacht, but as the total market cap increases, the likelihood of bad actors in the system goes up as well, and GRC is fundamentally defenseless against this type of attack. That said, it's an awesome project, and IMO earning GRC is quite a bit more fun than watching your numbers go up on some website's scoreboard. If you want to show your support for BOINC miners, by all means, buy up stacks of GRC, just don't expect massive returns from it.

roboticmind 6y ago
It's worth noting that one project only accounts for 1/19th of the current rewards for research and 0 of the rewards for staking. They do not have near complete control of the monetary supply. As well, as more projects are added to the whitelist that 1/19 fraction grows smaller Additionally if a project were to try to manipulate things, it's hard to do anything on a large scale without it being noticed. With it being noticed, a poll would almost certainly come up and get voted yes on to remove the project from the whitelist. In terms of those who gather stats from those projects, it requires at least 60% rounded up of the scrapers (who pull the stats) to exactly match. This is currently 4/6 although there will likely be more scrapers in the future. You'd have to collude with multiple people, and in a way that could also be easily detected from anyone cross comparing stats on BOINC and stats on Gridcoin. For the last part, yeah, it's for the science, and not for the money for me anyway. The Gridcoin I get for it is just a nice bonus

Ecstatify 6y ago

All articles about crypto should be banned on HN unless the author posts about any position they have in the coin. Influencers have to acknowledge when they’re promoting a product, it should be the same for all crypto.

space_rock 6y ago
Jump on the musical chairs scam and see if you make some money. Either way the crim posting this article is going to make money
jobigoud 6y ago
Should it be the same for articles about tech companies? Or about the economy in general if you own some index ETF?
- Ecstatify 6y ago
  In the article he's explicitly talking about an "investment thesis". If I wrote articles like below I should explicitly state my investment. "Why gold is a great investment" "Why You should invest in Tesla" "The Ark Space Exploration & Innovation ETF (NYSE: ARKX) is the future" If your objective is to get your readers to do something that could financially benefit you then you should make that clear. I noticed that some financial podcasts even have a disclaimer at the start of their podcast. --------------------------------------------------- Sorry I should have clarified in my original comment and said all articles shilling some coin