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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"""
Imagine and equivalent amount of computer power in an alternative future. I mean, you're right, and this limitation is a flaw in bitcoin, but you've also missed the point.
There's a pretty hard limit bounding the optimizability of SHA256. That's why hashcash uses a cryptographic hash function.
There may be - or, very likely are - shortcuts for proof of research better than Grover's; which, when found, will also be very useful for science and medicine. However, that advantage is theoretically destabilizing for a distributed consensus network; which is also a strange conflict in incentives.
Sort of like buying "buy gold" commercials when the market was heading into the worst recession since the Great Depression.
SSL accelerators may benefit from the SHA256 ASIC optimizations incentivized by the bitcoin design.
"""The accelerator provides the RSA public-key algorithm, several widely used symmetric-key algorithms, cryptographic hash functions, and a cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generator"""
GPU prices are also lower now; probably due to demand pulling volume. The TPS (transactions per second) rate is doing much better these days.
How would you solve the local daretime problem in order with Git and signatures?
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.
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.
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.
>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.
* 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.
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.
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.
question: what is the neoliberal obsession over negative interest rates? The point of negative interest rates is to encourage borrowing and "reinvestment over saving under the mattress". Typically the lowest interest rates are given to institutional investors (aka the very wealthy) while "the rest of us" have to take on interest rates that don't beat inflation. "Reinvestment" usually means "supporting fortune 500 companies that are in index funds.
If you think about it carefully, it basically sounds an awful like trickle-down economics.
Of course, there's the babysitter's coop parable, but that seems like not a monetary failure, but the failure of a really silly centralized decision to make a unit of labor time be fixed instead of having the unit of labor float in value.
> what is the neoliberal obsession over negative interest rates?
Disclaimer: I am no economist, I seem to disagree with most schools of though here and following is my private thinking with no other source available.
> The point of negative interest rates is to encourage borrowing
The point of lower interest rate is to encourage current consumption, both in consumption goods and investment goods, i.e. increase aggregate demand.
When do you want to do that? Well, if there is unemployment (as in proper willingness to work but no work available), quite obviously we would like to have more demand for goods/services in the society. Of course, some of the lower interesta rate goes to e.g. real estate and in ideal world that would be compensated with higher real estate taxes to avoid bubbles there.
When do you want to do the opposite? when there is too much demand compared to current production capacity, it actually makes sense to encourage people to consume (and invest) a bit less just today to avoid all kind of bubbles that seem so common in the times of economic overheating.
You actually can see lack of negative interest rates as a real market failure, when there is a lack of demand due to too high interest rates and economic values gets not produced because of that.
> silly centralized decision to make a unit of labor time be fixed instead of having the unit of labor float in value.
Well, apologies of being a bit sarcastic, but in my view you have two options:
1. You can believe in fairy tales about flexible labor prices and actually consider it good that people have lots of uncertainty about the value of their labor tomorrow.
2. You accept the reality that wages are sticky, and most people actually like the thing that they know how much they get paid tomorrow. Unfortunately in this option you must also accept that the aggregate demand needs to be managed less it gets chaotic and/or dies completely.
Only if you think that unbridled growth is an inherently good thing. Let's take an example, and say we run out if oil without a good substitute. Suddenly interest rates go up, because with an uncertain future nobody wants to count of the future productivity of any given individual. Do you run around and complain that there's a market failure; interest rates are too high, we need to encourage more consumption to keep the economy running!!! Does that seem like sensible policy to you?
> 2. You accept the reality that wages are sticky, and most people actually like the thing that they know how much they get paid tomorrow.
That's fine but the prescribed solution is to devalue the notional amount people get paid. So basically you are force feeding a lie. Moreover, it's one which hurts people getting paid less more than people getting paid more. Also, lower incomes are less flexible to quit their job and find a new one because their current one isn't paying as much in real value. I'd much much rather put companies in a position where they give lower income individuals a pay cut (or find a way to make their employee's labor more valuable) as a signal that they should look for a better paying situation than boil the water underneath them slowly. Anything less is coddling businesses.
> Only if you think that unbridled growth is an inherently good thing.
This has nothing to do with growth, but with welfare not being created due to otherwise willing seller and buyer not being able to transact due to artificially restricted pricing in the market.
> That's fine but the prescribed solution is to devalue the notional amount people get paid.
I think you confuse inflation and interest rates. Negative interest rate does not devalue money (price of bread says the same over time), but if you happen to have savings, those will of course be deminishing over time. Obviously, almost by definition, it is rich people, not poor people that have savings and bear the pain of negative rates.
Negative interest rate stimulates borrowing, which is an increase in the money supply, which is inflation. This is precisely the policy mechanism by which it's supposed to work. If you deny that negative interest rates cause inflation, you deny the raison d'être of the negative interest rate.
Rich people are not counting on savings interest to make money. They have investments. For example, land. With negative inflation rate, you encourage mortgage lending, which drives up the price of land, which is great for rich people. Similar careful analysis of what actually rich people do with their money will reveal likewise fashions by which a negative interest rate helps the wealthy.
I am talking about the rate of supply increase. A constant, predictable increase in supply over time would hopefully lead to constant, preditctable inflation.
DOGE is my favorite crypto for exactly this reason.
In early eighties many central banks tried targeting the amount of money in circulation to achieve stabe inflation, but failed. There is no reason to expect that a predefined rate of money supply would generate a predefined inflation. (See: gold, bitcoin)
Fair enough on the money supply point, although crypto currency so far has been somewhat isolated from the economics of nationstates, which are much more complicated than pure market forces.
My take: As long as people still "think in dollars" while they are spending cryptocurrency, purchasing power of cryptocurrencies will be pegged to the dollar. Neither gold nor bitcoin is "inflated" as currency. The dollar inflates (or doesn't), and if you want to pay for something denominated in dollars using something other than dollars, you simply convert at the current spot market rate. There won't be a Bitcoin macroeconomy until things are truly denominated in Bitcoin.
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.
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).
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...
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.
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.
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 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.
I overstated. I just had the thought that it would be nice if coin issuance would depend on some type of useful work (e.g. protein folding), and was glad to see that others who know a whole lot more about how cryptocurrency works, have created schemes to do just that. I have no idea on how to do it without centralizing coin issuance.
Unfortunately, no-one seems to know how to do it. It is a pretty hard problem: issuance tied to proof of work works because the solutions it generates are unique but machine verifiable. Unfortunately, problems with solutions that fulfill that requirement tend not to be very useful in and of themselves.
Edit: this is well beyond my expertise, perhaps someone with a better understanding of information theory can prove the above statement wrong. In that case, I hope they go out and build a crypto of their own!
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.
56 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadMy 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.
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. """
Unfortunatly BTC mining now runs almost entirely on ASICs that can't be used to compute anything but SHA-256.
There may be - or, very likely are - shortcuts for proof of research better than Grover's; which, when found, will also be very useful for science and medicine. However, that advantage is theoretically destabilizing for a distributed consensus network; which is also a strange conflict in incentives.
Sort of like buying "buy gold" commercials when the market was heading into the worst recession since the Great Depression.
SSL accelerators may benefit from the SHA256 ASIC optimizations incentivized by the bitcoin design.
"""The accelerator provides the RSA public-key algorithm, several widely used symmetric-key algorithms, cryptographic hash functions, and a cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generator"""
GPU prices are also lower now; probably due to demand pulling volume. The TPS (transactions per second) rate is doing much better these days.
How would you solve the local daretime problem in order with Git and signatures?
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.
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/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin
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.
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.
* GridCoin is highly inflationary and there's no inbuilt means of curtailing the supply.
If you think about it carefully, it basically sounds an awful like trickle-down economics.
Of course, there's the babysitter's coop parable, but that seems like not a monetary failure, but the failure of a really silly centralized decision to make a unit of labor time be fixed instead of having the unit of labor float in value.
Disclaimer: I am no economist, I seem to disagree with most schools of though here and following is my private thinking with no other source available.
> The point of negative interest rates is to encourage borrowing
The point of lower interest rate is to encourage current consumption, both in consumption goods and investment goods, i.e. increase aggregate demand.
When do you want to do that? Well, if there is unemployment (as in proper willingness to work but no work available), quite obviously we would like to have more demand for goods/services in the society. Of course, some of the lower interesta rate goes to e.g. real estate and in ideal world that would be compensated with higher real estate taxes to avoid bubbles there.
When do you want to do the opposite? when there is too much demand compared to current production capacity, it actually makes sense to encourage people to consume (and invest) a bit less just today to avoid all kind of bubbles that seem so common in the times of economic overheating.
You actually can see lack of negative interest rates as a real market failure, when there is a lack of demand due to too high interest rates and economic values gets not produced because of that.
> silly centralized decision to make a unit of labor time be fixed instead of having the unit of labor float in value.
Well, apologies of being a bit sarcastic, but in my view you have two options:
1. You can believe in fairy tales about flexible labor prices and actually consider it good that people have lots of uncertainty about the value of their labor tomorrow.
2. You accept the reality that wages are sticky, and most people actually like the thing that they know how much they get paid tomorrow. Unfortunately in this option you must also accept that the aggregate demand needs to be managed less it gets chaotic and/or dies completely.
Only if you think that unbridled growth is an inherently good thing. Let's take an example, and say we run out if oil without a good substitute. Suddenly interest rates go up, because with an uncertain future nobody wants to count of the future productivity of any given individual. Do you run around and complain that there's a market failure; interest rates are too high, we need to encourage more consumption to keep the economy running!!! Does that seem like sensible policy to you?
> 2. You accept the reality that wages are sticky, and most people actually like the thing that they know how much they get paid tomorrow.
That's fine but the prescribed solution is to devalue the notional amount people get paid. So basically you are force feeding a lie. Moreover, it's one which hurts people getting paid less more than people getting paid more. Also, lower incomes are less flexible to quit their job and find a new one because their current one isn't paying as much in real value. I'd much much rather put companies in a position where they give lower income individuals a pay cut (or find a way to make their employee's labor more valuable) as a signal that they should look for a better paying situation than boil the water underneath them slowly. Anything less is coddling businesses.
This has nothing to do with growth, but with welfare not being created due to otherwise willing seller and buyer not being able to transact due to artificially restricted pricing in the market.
> That's fine but the prescribed solution is to devalue the notional amount people get paid.
I think you confuse inflation and interest rates. Negative interest rate does not devalue money (price of bread says the same over time), but if you happen to have savings, those will of course be deminishing over time. Obviously, almost by definition, it is rich people, not poor people that have savings and bear the pain of negative rates.
Rich people are not counting on savings interest to make money. They have investments. For example, land. With negative inflation rate, you encourage mortgage lending, which drives up the price of land, which is great for rich people. Similar careful analysis of what actually rich people do with their money will reveal likewise fashions by which a negative interest rate helps the wealthy.
DOGE is my favorite crypto for exactly this reason.
My take: As long as people still "think in dollars" while they are spending cryptocurrency, purchasing power of cryptocurrencies will be pegged to the dollar. Neither gold nor bitcoin is "inflated" as currency. The dollar inflates (or doesn't), and if you want to pay for something denominated in dollars using something other than dollars, you simply convert at the current spot market rate. There won't be a Bitcoin macroeconomy until things are truly denominated in Bitcoin.
http://foldingcoin.net/
In other words, I think the necessary centralization of a project like Gridcoin is a large exploitable flaw.
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.
Edit: this is well beyond my expertise, perhaps someone with a better understanding of information theory can prove the above statement wrong. In that case, I hope they go out and build a crypto of their own!