For those that are wondering how this works, Gridcoin uses PoS - not PoW - and then rewards for research on top of it. It is not locked into any algorithm because it's not PoW. There are currently 18 different BOINC project [1] that it rewards. New projects can be voted in or can be voted off.
To try to reduce the centralization, there is a system of oracles that gathers the stats from each project and the nodes verify that the oracles match each other. As well, each project only consists of 1/18th of the rewards [2] from research and there's also new coins rewarded for just staking, so if a project acts up, they wouldn't be able to largely manipulate coin supply.
If you have any more questions about it, feel free to ask me
Whats the use for the coin? Its an incentive obviously but its only so because it has a price tag. Who should buy the coin from me if I "mined" one and what would he do with it?
As one of the commenters mention, it's an issue with all cryptocurrencies. Right now one of the reason people want to get Gridcoin is to get enough to stake regularly to earn their rewards or because they believe in the coin. In the future, there's been some ideas floating around that I think are very interesting. For instance, one idea that's been floating around is to create a service that accepts GRC and offers assistance to researchers for setting up a BOINC project
No, its not with all, maybe with most but regardless this doesn't add any anything. I want to know specifically for this coin.
>to get enough to stake regularly to earn their rewards
Reward paid in, let me guess, more coins. self fueling like most other coins. Thats not a real usecase
>because they believe in the coin
so it has religion-like properties, awesome /s not a use case
>create a service that accepts GRC and offers assistance to researchers for setting up a BOINC project
so its used as a medium of exchange which boils down to the price tag it has.
you could just pay someone with normal money
no one would want to be paid in gridcoin unless one gets overpaid. Obviously this is also not a use case.
I'll admit it's not great right now, but I don't know if I understand what you view as a use case? If using it to get things of value with it is not a use case, then what coin or currency has any use case? Everything is a transfer of value even beyond just currencies be it paid in time or other things
> Reward paid in, let me guess, more coins. self fueling like most other coins. Thats not a real usecase
It's also worth noting that you don't have to go through it if you use a pool, and there's work on making it not require pools if you don't want to start out with any Gridcoin. If you look up Gridcoin and "Manual rewards claim" you'll find some of the discussion about it.
> so it has religion-like properties, awesome /s not a use case
I was thinking more in terms of some of the reasons why Gridcoin's developers have Gridcoin - not necessarily advocating for others to do the same. I should have clarified that I didn't think this was a use case
I should also mention that having Gridcoin helps you in polls. Gridcoin has a system of polls and the polls are weighted by how much work you do in BOINC and how many coins you have. Note that it's your amount of those before a poll so you can't try to gain more influence after learning of a poll. It of course has its own issues and discussions about how or if votes should be weighted
Maybe I should have said a "unique use case" and also one that out-competes other similar systems.
Buying stuff with the coin may be an use case but this coin is in no way better than the thousands others for doing just that. Its very much end of the line for acceptance and thus this use case is not really valid.
I see using it a currency backed by scientific work is already something that makes using it unique and can make people interested in accepting it and use it. I see that you don't view it the same way, but that's okay too
As well, here's one thing that may or may not usecase per se, but it is something a that's different from most cryptos in use of the coin itself. It's nice feature that only a one or maybe a handful other coins [1] called sidestaking. With it you can send any % of your staking rewards to other addresses in the coinbase transaction. So you could for instance use it to donate to BOINC projects that accept Gridcoin every time you stake (and people already do that). Or you could send it to a friend when you stake or anyone really. You can send to multiple addresses every time you stake with different % for each (up to 6 before it has to cycle through them on each stake) to. On the flip side, accepting Gridcoin means you can also accept sidestakes (at least for things like donations)
Sorry to rain on your parade but this is utter nonsense. Its not backed by anything. Words have meanings and you cant just use an existing word to describe some different imaginary concept. There is no such thing as baking "money" with past work. The benefit of past work is already "used", it can not somehow hold value for the rest of time. If you calculate the larges know prime number that number does in no way have or hold the value of work you put in to get it. the number is in fact worthless once it is known.
>sidestakes
I'm impressed what kind of nonsense people come up with and can somehow present as something valuable.
Sounds like the self fueling money printer system named gridcoin has a builtin function to donate fractions of the printed money to different addresses. literally donation by inflation - should be called stimulus lol.
Maybe backed was a bad word to use. I more just meant that it's creation is linked with scientific work having been done. That it has a value linked to helping science - not a direct one to one thing you can exchange for helping science. More so that accepting it means that you know that part of it came from helping science
> If you calculate the larges know prime number that number does in no way have or hold the value of work you put in to get it. the number is in fact worthless once it is known.
None of the projects on Gridcoin are currently for finding Prime numbers. There was one in the past, but it was removed from the whitelist per the admin's request. I also disagree with the notion prime numbers they are worthless once they are known, but I'm not going to go into that because it's not relevant here
With Gridcoin the work is meaningful after it has been done. Take for instance the biomedical research done by a bunch of projects. The proteins and the drugs they help lead to have massive impacts to a lot of people. Now it isn't something you can exchange back and forth through time obviously, but its result is something you can still see is meaningful
> literally donation by inflation
I didn't say it wasn't from inflation, but it's opposed to many making no donations at all and there still being the same amount of inflation. It's used a lot because it's convenient to setup and it doesn't result in any extra transaction fees or the like. The alternative in other coins is that people just don't end up sending anything more and just take all of the newly minted coins
> should be called stimulus lol
:/
not going to go into this
I think continuing this conversation is not going to really result in much. I'm not sure what exactly you are looking for that you see in other cryptocurrencies. I think this is going keep going in circles.
The prime number thing was an example not related to this coin.
The stimulus thing was just a joke.
I'm not looking for anything that "I see in other cryptocurrencies". I was just looking for a reason why this coins should be used by anyone. The other 9k coins are irrelevant.
In it's heyday during 2018 it got up to 15-17 cents (USD), but by the end of 2018 it was at 1/2 cent and by the end of 2019 it was at 1/10 cent. It's been delisted from most of the major exchanges and pulled from wallet apps like Coinomi; your observations above are correct, you need to have coin to make coin and you cannot make coin quickly without throwing a lot of hardware at it. You must use their wallet, which is... well, it has a lot of users having to deal with it not working right/needing repaired frequently (see /r/gridcoin).
There were a few businesses accepting the coins for awhile (VPN providers, there was a hosting provider for a bit, I think a stickers/mugs/tshirt website, etc.) but that seemed to have dried up by 2019. The community itself has always seemed nice/pleasant, this is not a comment on those working the coin just on it's actual viability in real life - kinda has no use beyond owning it to make and own more of it as a curiosity. When I stopped using/trying I just dumped whatever random couple hundred coins I had into a public faucet, wasn't worth the hassle of trying to cash out $10 after a year of participating.
It's worth noting that a lot of work (4500+ hours in ten months of development and testing[1]) has been put into a massive rewrite of the wallet in 5.0.0. The wallet is a lot more stable than it was when you last used it, the GUI is much better, tons of old crappy code was removed, thing are more secure in general, etc. There's also much better testing of releases now too
That's fantastic to hear - while I have your ear, as a WCG cruncher I did not want to (be forced to) join Team Gridcoin in order for the work to be counted. Along with above work, has the WCG requirement to join Team Gridcoin been lifted (design altered to another method) now/as well? Teams are 50% of the fun in WCG, so the requirements for a specific team membership are unwelcome.
I was also really wanting manual reward claim (the current staking method is a lottery), I think that's still in progress reading the other comments - if I'm crunching for coin, being subject to a lottery method of when I'll get "paid" is a non starter, I want to claim my work coins when I want. The sheer fact that users with large coin are encouraged to split their stakes to increase their lottery chances of winning the stake are just crap, it's heavily biased towards HODLers and people who got in around 2016 and have a million coins - basically, the coin poor are penalized, newcomers have no hope in this staking scheme. I've always thought it was a little ponzi-scheme-like to be honest.
That's correct that the requirement to be on team Gridcoin was removed in 5.0.0. You can now earn Gridcoin from any BOINC team.
The manual rewards claim is still in the works although there's now some more specific plans in mind [1] for it than there were in the past. It's on the roadmap somewhere
[1] See this message from Jim Owens (one of the core developers) about some of what he's thinking https://discord.com/channels/211637812968161280/338020950714.... I would normally quote this instead of making you have to join a Discord, but it's rather lengthy and part of a discussion
Thanks for the update, progress! I'll dig into the last bit more, I don't Discord but I'm sure it's over on reddit or that other place people blog for coin (it's been a minute since last I was in this game). Much appreciated.
Originally the main developers didn't request any compensation for this, but yes they will be compensated in Gridcoin. The reason for this is partly that Gridcoin is really community run and doesn't have much USD or other fiat just lying around, but with the history of the foundation address (not an organization), there's a fair amount of Gridcoin that can be spent on it and other tasks
"Originally it wasn't mean to be paid by printing "money" but then they did exactly that because somehow they hand no fiat lying around."
Its useless development paid by useless coins for the sake of making the useless coins spendable to pay for the useless development.
A self-feeding nonsense system that happens to produce software that no one would actually want to pay for.
The whole system is only prevented from collapsing by the fact that some people hold on to the coins in hope of future profit and some may even buy them for that reason.
I just want to note that I meant originally for the 5.0.0 work the developers didn't request compensation, and so it hasn't been sent just yet since it the request was recent. It has nothing to do with being paid in Gridcoin or not.
> Its useless development paid by useless coins for the sake of making the useless coins spendable to pay for the useless development. A self-feeding nonsense system that happens to produce software that no one would actually want to pay for.
It's community run. There isn't really a "they" deciding anything or paying for things. It's not paid for so much as compensated. Some people have done work on it without requesting any compensation. I think you think there is a more formal system in place here than there is. The only reason there is a bunch of Gridcoin lying around in that foundation address for this is because of the transition from Gridcoin-Classic to modern Gridcoin [1] which arguably probably shouldn't have been done the way it was, but it's too late for anyone to reverse that decision from 2014.
As with the other thread, I don't think continuing this thread will be lead to very much either.
Lastly, I just want to note that for me, the reason that some of this doesn't matter as much to me personally (not that it doesn't matter at all) is because I view Gridcoin more as an addition to the science. If Gridcoin collapsed and went to zero, I still would have done something useful with my machines and helped science. I can't say that about many other coins.
How are those issues any different from other currencies or coins? It really comes down to trust and security, which this offers just like others do. At a high level view it's just basically bitcoin but with coins created through externally useful work.
So its just another "better" bitcoin. But bitcoin is already useless. And we already have FBA coins instead of PoW/PoS which are way more efficient. It remove the external "useful" work completely.
>Whats the use for the coin? Its an incentive obviously but its only so because it has a price tag. Who should buy the coin from me if I "mined" one and what would he do with it?
This is the same for any crypto coin. Certainly not unique to Gridcoin.
Bitcoin was mean to be p2p cash. It has no legitimate use case anymore as it obviously failed to be p2p cash.
Ethereum tried to be many things mostly a decentral computer. Turned out to be a super expensive decentral computer and that it isn't really so decentral in the current version.
However its technically used this way by some people so that de-facto means it has a valid use case.
It can hardly compete against newer similar projects but thats another story.
The Bitcoin idea didn't fail to be cash. BTC failed to be cash because it forced a permanent 1mb block size limit. If you want to see the original Bitcoin idea working as a charm, use Bitcoin Cash (BCH).
Well if its meant to be used as p2p cash but can not be used in this manner since many years that ticks all the boxes for me to call it failed. but you are entitled to your own opinion on this.
BCH solves nothing, the larger block size may allows some more Tx but you still have 10min block times and then wait for however many confirmation blocks you want. Not exactly how I imagine p2p cash is supposed to work.
and if the throughput would reach the new max with the new block size it would suffer exploding fees just like the "main" bitcoin. It does not scale better it just has a higher limit not one that would allow any meaningful throughput to use it as a global p2p cash system. no one has it to use it as p2p cash. Everyone has it to sell it for profit later on.
To try to reduce the centralization, there is a system of oracles that gathers the stats from each project and the nodes verify that the oracles match each other. As well, each project only consists of 1/18th of the rewards [2] from research and there's also new coins rewarded for just staking, so if a project acts up, they wouldn't be able to largely manipulate coin supply.
If you have any more questions about it, feel free to ask me
[1] https://gridcoin.us/guides/whitelist.htm
[2] https://gridcoin.us/wiki/magnitude.html
Note: I help work on the gridcoin.us website and have ~5000 Gridcoin, so I may be biased in my view of the coin :)