Apologies for not continuing this conversation for a while, I've been a little preoccupied.
"I was initially thinking more along the lines of a distributed liquidity bot system where each volunteer node dialed home (to the BOINC project) for instructions"
That's actually the opposit of my idea.
Yeah, when I was writing my response I realized that my suggestion could potentially provide too much centralized power over liquidity to the BOINC project admin (if it was an individual in charge instead of a team).
That said, wouldn't the liquidity bot need to dial home to the BOINC project for the 'strategy'? I was thinking something along the lines of a commercial front-end where users can pay for more computing resources to be dedicated to running liquidity bots for their crypto asset (fee for project admin, large chunk of payment used for providing liquidity and the rest distributed to volunteers).
Were you thinking more along the lines of having the bots pull a strategy (perhaps not download a strategy but rather interpret where liquidity is required?) from the Bitshares blockchain/platform instead of from the BOINC project server, and have liquidity paid for by a Bitshares worker proposal?
When you say 'strategy' do you mean these different modes? Or new liquidity strategies?
- Short'n Forget (for SmartCoin)
- Send'n Forget (for SmartCoin and UIA)
"BOINC allows you to distribute software that can utilize the full resources of the volunteer's computer & network at no cost to the BOINC project"
Exactly, you will be able to distribute the strategy to the volunteers so they would be able to see if the proposed tx is correct and they sign/approve it if that looks correct (In an automated way, of course).
Ok, you mean to distribute software that performs a large collaborative multisig verification to approve a single liquidity bot instance's transactions?
Sounds quite smart, I was initially thinking more along the lines of every volunteer running the liquidity bot software so that there's hundreds of liquidity enabling transactions occurring from multiple sources.
"Whilst a significant quantity of users may run BOINC on low performance hardware"
You don't need something powerful for that at all! It's just that you need to find something that prevent a guy to do a 51% attack (by creating 51% more accounts and use it approve a tx which the money to their account) and for that you do random computations to differentiate the volunteers by their computation power (their voting weight would be their computation power).
A couple ideas:
- Mimic Dash's masternode idea - have users lock funds away (like a deposit) in order to run the software, if they were to try to steal funds or manipulate the liquidity software then they could lose the deposit?
- Invite/referral based system (would be a big negative on a Gridcoin whitelist application).
- Implement a reputation based system? Perhaps trust volunteers over time, or trust users who link their BOINC account to their Bitshares account? You could certainly try to detect similar BOINC user behavior, you could block TOR IP addresses and detect the same IP signing up multiple BOINC accounts.
- You could potentially issue an UIA to your BOINC volunteers and use that to decide voting weight? Perhaps users could buy into that to have more stake weight?
Their voting weight would be with their computation power? Like the computing power they contribute towards other BOINC projects, or do you mean implementing some form of Proof Of Work?