i would like to talk about the possibility of vortac and startail having a weird amount of power right now...
need receipts for google ads. also, he is surely making affiliate sales, no? can we not set up an affiliate program in Gridcoin's name? also also, we are giving him Gridcoin for the expense... if he pays out of pocket, he is creating a buy structure for himself. you wouldn't just sell him a few million GRC, but you'd surely give it for a voted expense. and if all the "new" accounts gained by the doubled adshare is being timed with the bots being prepared with CPIDs... and if they were working together... no one could say boo. this is a serious problem. look at how easy irpg was to manipulate. there's still fake users in there. all of them had BOINC accounts. a bunch of shared CPUs... but how am i supposed to prove that? i'd be concerned to know what checks are enabled on the faucet site, seeing as my VPN was blocked, and i'm a legitimate person, what are the stipulations?
also, the faucet. 20K is pretty steep, considering it will be drained by 1000 fake accounts in a day. 20 GRC a pop is insane. how many do you need to start a wallet? 1.1? also choked that there isn't a "more than" option in the RAC... i can't help but feel like that's a slap in the face to the "abstain" vote over irpg... but whatever... i'm crazy, right?
am i the only one who can see a concerted effort to drain the foundation, and perform a 51% attack?
all this talk of POSv3 too... from people that can't claim to hack through html... but you know C today? ok.
RE: Manipulating google ad traffic -> not likely, google'd detect this.
RE: Buy structure -> Yeah possibly, but then so is every other foundation expense, I paid for the coinpayments integration and got GRC in return.
RE: Affiliate program - GRC isn't a company, we don't have the ability to track who referred a user to BOINC and google have put a lot of research into preventing ad abuse - making our own affiliate system would be a nightmare.
RE: Foundation drainage - I don't see the correlation and there aren't enough coins in the foundation to perform a 51% attack with.
RE: Faucet manipulation - there's a lot of security checks that have been added, combined with brainstorming the correct parameters for bonus grc for new CPIDS: https://cryptocointalk.com/topic/51989-poll-research-bounty-reward-at-gridcoinstats-faucet/ I don't think it's worth worrying about 20k GRC in a heavily secured faucet.
RE: POSv3 - What's your point, that only Rob should have an opinion on GRC's staking mechanisms?
I've decided not to vote on AdWords campaign (since I am running it), nor on startail's faucet expense (since I proposed it initially). Both efforts will have more credibility that way.
As I have said before, if a trusted community member wants to check the AdWords account I set up for Gridcoin, just drop me a PM and I'll provide the login details. I believe CM has checked it out already. Rob also has the login details, but I don't think he has enough time to audit it properly. Community will understand that I don't want anyone snooping over my credit card details there.
If anyone else wants to run AdWords (and pay for it), I would certainly be glad to let him take over. I have lost plenty of money on this, since I am refunded in GRC and its price has mostly declined last year. It's a pretty bad idea to build up your GRC stake through Foundation expenses, buying it on Poloniex has been much more affordable so far (just set your bids low and wait).
We've heard plenty of we could, we should, might we, can we not etc. Well, having some skills in Photoshop, in April 2016. I decided to take the initiative and to create the AdWords account for Gridcoin (and pay for it). I think our advertising efforts before that were managed by CM and I believe no member with programming or web-development skills should waste his time on creating flashy banners and moving pixels in Photoshop.
I'll try to participate in tomorrow's hangout, to address any further concerns.
I received 211 813 GRC from the Foundation so far, in exchange for our AdWords expenses. Since Poloniex fee is 0.15% for bidders, I saved 317 GRC on Poloniex fees (or 1.73 USD). A rather negligible amount, compared to the losses I've taken because the value of GRC has decreased in 2016.
Since it's well known we have spent 5 USD per day on AdWords last year, you could have done the math too, it's not that hard. I won't address your concerns about a 51% attack because that's plain FUD.
Bitcoin is basically the rising tide over the price of most-everything in this economy, currently. That's primarily why we've been seeing such a price decrease in the value. Coinpayments is a huge step in the right direction because of how it doesn't tie the price of Gridcoin to Bitcoin anymore, and having the website come into fruition at the same time is another great involvement. Can never be too careful about transparency throughout this process and I (for what it's worth, which may not be much) appreciate your transparency among the good work done to bring the site up. I just hope that some future issues could be resolved, such as the possible exploits/vector of attack on the faucet or lack of SSL/https.