Thoughts on GRC [001] – Introduction
I used to run SETI@home in 1999 and joined Folding@home in 2000 as well. When BOINC was released in 2002 it was another interesting project that got me all excited. However around 2006 my life changed a lot and my focus shifted heavily towards other aspects of life.
About a month ago I stumbled upon a reddit post about Gridcoin and it reintroduced me to BOINC. Needless to say I’m all in again because it simply is awesome. The altruistic concept is genious imho: people basically donate resources (electricity + hardware -> CPU/GPU) in order to help out scientists with their research – who otherwise would have to purchase hardware themselves and run projects locally or rely on cloud computing which can be expensive – and thus reducing costs since budgets are mostly limited.
Gridcoin introduces a very interesting aspect to this: it rewards (semi) altruistic people for sharing their resources with scientists, thus creating an additional incentive to run BOINC projects. One can argue about the nature of this relationship and how it should be judged compared to the classic BOINC user who is not interested in a reward system – and I certainly would like to have this discussion another time – yet, it is interesting to see how Team Gridcoin’s computations have had high positive impact on the progress of some projects.
I think it is fair to say that bringing GRC to the table as a reward for donating hardware and energy, has convinced a few people (who might not have done so before due to lack of motivation) to join the ranks of the miners. But it also displays a very known fact: humans in general are not altruistic – something that I consider to be a major flaw within our species – and the collaboration of BOINC and Gridcoin certainly shows that there needs to be some sort of incentive to even consider contributing to such a beautiful and very essential project like BOINC.
So while some people simply decide to become part of this for various reasons, there sure are some who like the fact that they can make a profit with GRC, either by pool/solo mining or by trading on various exchanges, using GRC as an entry-level currency that can be mined fairly easy and also doesn’t involve many risks – unlike some other coins that turned out to be scams one way or another. But no matter why people chose GRC and what they do with it, there are a few aspects that might also keep people away from GRC.
Thus, in this series (Thoughts on GRC) I will try to give an overview of what I think is currently holding back the BOINC-GRC-symbiosis and offer different ideas and concepts that may (or may not) have a positive impact on this collaboration. My focus will be on Gridcoin for now because that is currently what I have more insight into being a newbie miner – but also because I still need to catch up a lot more on BOINC-related topics before I feel comfortable discussing its core concept.
With all this in mind, I would like to invite everyone to discuss and criticize my thoughts throughout this series. Hopefully we can have a really constructive discourse leading to better solutions of current issues and further optimizations to improve the overall BOINC-GRC-experience for as many people as possible.
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This post will serve as an index, linking to all future articles of this series.
Thoughts on GRC [002] – How the user experience could be improved (1)
Thoughts on GRC [003] – How the user experience could be improved (2)
[Thoughts on GRC [004] –] ()
[Thoughts on GRC [005] –] ()
[Thoughts on GRC [006] –] ()
