If you've been hanging around the Gridcoin SubReddit page recently, you probably noticed a very intriguing post titled:
The original poster is from a new company called "King's Distributed Systems," and they are launching an ICO for a distributed computing system similar to what Golem is pursuing. During their Alpha phase, they will be using BOINC as a platform and paying BOINC crunchers who sign up for their Alpha with their token (called SPARC) which trades on the Ethereum blockchain. This token is awarded on top of any Gridcoin a cruncher may already be earning. The King's Distributed System team claims to be also getting involved in BOINC development, and have the support of some people within BOINC who are happy to see the platform marketed by this project.
That's all the information I'm wanting to share about them in this article, because I'm not really here to discuss SPARC, really.
You'll notice I put the word "competition" in quotes in the title of this post. That's because this can only be loosely interpreted as competition since collecting SPARC tokens for your BOINC work has exactly zero impact on your ability to collect Gridcoin.
It is competition to Gridcoin, insomuch as Gridcoin gains at least some of its value in the total amount of computational power available on the Gridcoin network. Keep in mind, SPARC's whitepaper suggests that potentially as soon as Q1 of 2018 they hope to have their own distributed computing platform available. If you choose to collect SPARC in addition to Gridcoin while they are on the BOINC network, you will theoretically have a decision to make in Q1 of 2018 as to whether or not you want to follow SPARC to their own platform and leave Gridcoin, or if you'd rather stay with BOINC and Gridcoin.
Even then, the vast majority of Gridcoiners are doing this (at an opportunity cost of more lucrative coins they could be mining) to support science. I would argue the number of people crunching for BOINC who will want to leave BOINC to contribute to commercial distributed computing will be very, very small. If you were interested in profit-seeking, odds are you'd be mining a different coin right now.
With all that said, the existence of SPARC has ruffled quite a few feathers. To be honest, as someone who has invested heavily in Gridcoin over the last couple months.... I like that. I'm sorry if that comes off as offensive, but having another CryptoCurrency/CryptoAsset setting up shop right across the street is potentially a very good thing.
I'm reluctant to even offer this up for fear of how it will be taken, but my biggest concern with Gridcoin is that I feel as though we operate based on the assumption that we are in competition with nobody. A lack of competition tends to create a Laissez-Fair atmosphere. We have such an awesome community, but we struggle in acting with any sense of urgency. Regardless of your opinion about King's Distributed Computing as a company, or whether you reject my belief that their existence is good for us, we need to act with a greater sense of urgency.
The cryptocurrency market is a giant pie, and we have no idea if or how much bigger that pie will get. What we do know for sure is that there are over 800 cryptocoins competing for their share of the existing pie. Gridcoin is a decentralized coin, which means it's governed by everyone who holds the coin. We need to move forward with the reality that we're competing with 800+ other coins. If we sit back, or if we innovate too slowly, we will always steadily lose ground.
A great example is the recent whitelist polls. We had some issues with the blockchain that resulted in peoples' magnitudes (a factor in voting weight) being temporarily inflated or deflated based on which projects they were crunching and whether or not those projects were included in the current SuperBlock. Most of the whitelist polls resulted in an ~80% consensus, yet we still have members of our community who want to spend another two weeks re-listing the polls before we take any action.
Guys..... that's nonsense! The majority of your voting weight is based on your coin ownership. The temporary magnitude issues had minimal impact on these polls. We don't need another two weeks to confirm that Leiden Classical should be removed from the whitelist because they are no longer accepting new registrations. To be honest, we should be moving toward a future where basic issues like that don't even require a whitelist vote.
Let's talk about the team requirement. We recently voted against lifting the team requirement, which is really ultimately more of an outdated technical limitation than a philosophical discussion. Now, what's about to happen is we have a different Crypto coming to BOINC without a team requirement. So all the benefit we were hoping to have by being able to advertise our coin to team administrators, discuss on BOINC forums, etc.... another coin is going to be able to get out in front of those audiences before us. While, again, we should be able to capture the same audience if/when we lift the team requirement, it's unfortunate that as a 4-year old coin we weren't the first to be able to offer crypto-payments to BOINCers regardless of team affiliation.
I'm actually a bit disappointed that the KDS/SPARC team chose to paint Gridcoin in such a negative light and feature it in their whitepaper, but objectively I can't say that they're being unfair with their criticism. Up until just yesterday, Gridcoin has never had paid developers (note: it seems clear with their $25 million market cap comment about Gridcoin that this whitepaper was written a solid month ago) and because of that fact, development has indeed likely been slow. Most other coins have paid developers. Our own developers will freely admit that donating limited free time with no compensation makes every project and every task take longer.
My best advice to those of us who don't like that criticism, though, is to double-down on your efforts to move Gridcoin forward. If the idea of SPARC working in the BOINC space bothers you, use that to help us forge ahead. Start polls to help us make decisions. Write Steemit articles to help get the word out about GRC. Participate in some of our Slack channels on topics such as branding, public relations, copyrighting, etc and help push those efforts toward real-world action.
The world is a big free market, friends. SPARC has just as much right to be here as we do, so we can't control that. What we can control is our efforts to move Gridcoin forward and make it more nimble and more cognizant of the competition that surrounds us. Lots of really awesome things are happening right now with Gridcoin and if we continue to support those things, we will dominate this space and be set up for future success.
