Recently there was a descision from PrimeGrid that they no longer wanted to allow monetization of BOINC credit on their project, I dont want to misrepresent anything, so here is the link to their announcement and the thread that followed.
I respect their descision in terms of they want to ensure their results arent skewed by people hungry for GRC doing anything and everything to get credits from their project.
And yes its a BIG HOWEVER from me, I do feel that the PrimeGrid project descision, would be very detremental to BOINC if it were to follow through to other projects. Why?
Lets wind back to when I, and probably a lot of other BOINC participants started crunching. You had a computer, you were using maybe 5% of its capacity if you were really lucky. Most of the time it was doing nothing much of value.
You see BOINC and it speaks to you, why not give your 95%+ spare computing capacity to help science, its a no-brainer right? Its charitable giving, that effectively cost you nothing. Where do I sign up?
10 years ago Bitcoin happened. I actually heard about it reasonably early on, and I possibly could have mined some of the blocks on my computer that was doing BOINC (speculative, but lets go with it), but Id rather do BOINC than make some Magic Internet Money that was the reserve of some odd people.
But todays landscape is different, crypto-currency has captured the imagination of many people with computer equipment, or the knowledge/desire to learn. So the decision I made back in 2005 or whenever it was to do BOINC, isnt the same descision as is faced by people today. If I were making that descision now, would I have chosen crypto-currency mining, or BOINC?
Maybe (ok probably) Im a little weird, and perhaps with no prior knowledge I still might go for science, but lets be realistic, your average person available for BOINC or crypto mining, I think has a much higher chance of going for the latter.
People and hardware dont last forever; your BOINCers of today, at some point need to be replaced with new participants, and that is just to stay at the rather un-inspirational static participation level. If we truly believe in distributed computing, then we should be aiming for mass adoption well beyond current levels, shouldnt we?
Is it, I dont think thats what BOINC is a all, look at the homepage, its got "It can be used for commercial purposes, and applications need not be open source." listed right there! But I take the point. If you want to keep distributed computing for free science though, you need to recognise not only the threat from other money making methods, but that several projects have their aim to make distributed computing a paid for marketplace; Golem and SONM amongst others are creating paid-for-compute distributed computing marketplaces.
So now you not only have to decide between distributed computing and other things to use up your compute resources (that could make you money), but there are a number of ways to do both at the same time.
As we sit today, only Gridcoin will keep BOINC free to use for science projects, but also incentivise users financially. If I can say anything to the wider BOINC community, it is that they should of course recognise the challenges, but also the opportunities that block-chain can bring, perhaps Gridcoin can help us finally beat the cheats; after all block-chain exists to allow people to trust one another across the internet. I see it as a Polaroid moment, if you are young and dont know what Polaroid was, it was a very popular method of taking near instant photographs on film, that died when digital imaging became popular.
I think the BOINC community as a whole needs to look at Gridcoin not as a competitor or a disruptor, but as a supporter; as a method to hold back the tide of new technologies that threaten to remove participation from BOINC altogether. That is why I have been part of Gridcoin for the long haul, and why I dont immediately sell my research rewards, Im trying to support the creation of currency, that just happens to be distributed to people who are incentivised to do good for humanity.
