What is Gridcoin?
Gridcoin is a cryptocurrency that securely rewards BOINC computation on top of Proof of Stake. BOINC statistics are gathered directly from the whitelisted BOINC project servers & all nodes agree on a daily superblock containing verified team statistics.
Gridcoin related links
Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, Reddit, Cryptocointalk, IRC #Gridcoin, Soundcloud, YouTube, Tumblr, Coinmarketcap.
What is BOINC?
BOINC is an open-source volunteer oriented distributed computing grid. It's free, and harnesses the unused clock cycles from processors and graphics cards to attempt to cure cancer/aids/ebola/malaria, map the milkyway, fold proteins, search for extraterrestrial life, etc.
What are some examples of existing BOINC projects?
World Community Grid : Attempting to solve Cancer, Ebola, Malaria, Zika, etc
SETI@Home : Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)
GPUGRID: Full-atom molecular simulations of proteins
Milkyway@home : Creation of a 3d map of the milkyway galaxy using data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This project enables research in both astroinformatics and computer science.
Examples of more whitelisted projects
Who can make a BOINC project?
Anyone can create a BOINC project, there's no centralised authority that you are required to consult before creating a BOINC project. If you've got a good idea, go ahead and create it.
How can I make a BOINC project?
You could simplify project setup by using the BOINC Server Docker container.
Read this official (old) 'creating boinc projects' PDF guide to get an understanding of how to implement a boinc project. [VIRUSTOTAL SCAN: 0/53]
Look into the project creation cookbook to simplify the implementation of a BOINC project.
'Building BOINC and BOINC applications on linux' - October 2009
What are the benefits of a BOINC project over cloud computing?
Whitepapers on this topic
The cost of virtualization implementation in volunteer computing
Increasing GP Computing Power for Free via Desktop GRID Computing and Virtualization
Cost-Benefit Analysis
[PDF] Cost-Benefit Analysis of Cloud Computing versus Desktop Grids
[VIRUSTOTAL SCAN RESULTS: 0 / 53]
An extract from the above PDF:
We determined the cost-benefits of cloud computing versus volunteer computing applications. We calculated VC overheads for platform construction, application deployment, compute rates, and completion times. We found that in the best-case scenario, hosts register at a rate of 124 cloud nodes per day. We found that the ratio of volunteer nodes needed to achieve the compute power of a small EC2 instance is about 2.83 active volunteer hosts to 1.
What are the different possible categories of BOINC project?
Volunteer/non-profit
Scientists: Use BOINC to create a volunteer computing project.
Universities: Use BOINC to create a Virtual Campus Supercomputing Center.
Commercial/For-Profit
Companies: use BOINC for desktop Grid computing.
Create a commercial BOINC project (such as a video rendering project), charge customer and distribute pay to BOINC crunchers (with a small fee for the BOINC project to continue maintenance).
BOINC DAC (Theoretical)
Create a BOINC decentralized autonomous company that anyone can profit from, and anyone can submit relevant work units towards for GRC.
You would need to investigate reducing the centralisation of the BOINC server to be categorised as decentralized. Additional development would be required to monetize a BOINC DAC potentially via a smart contract.
Related research
Optimizing the data distribution layer of BOINC with BitTorrent.
Attic: A Case Study for Distributing Data in BOINC Projects.
Extending the BOINC architecture using peer-to-peer application code exchange.
Golem Project.
Brainstorming new BOINC projects
We have an existing thread on cryptocointalk where we have discussed ideas for new projects.
Do you have an idea for a potential BOINC project, or do you have questions about either BOINC or Gridcoin? Reply below! You don't need to have the skills to implement the project, we want to hear all ideas! :)
Best regards,
CM.
Project Rain
This is the project I've been working on recently.
'Project Rain' is the practice of distributing crypto assets to BOINC users based on their verified BOINC computation; it was initially devised within the Gridcoin network and has been expanded to multiple cryptocurrencies and all BOINC teams through this BOINC project.
Through this BOINC project, you will be able to match a user's BOINC CPID to their multiple crypto asset addresses/accounts to which you can distribute your asset against.
Think of Project Rain as a new share-dropping vector that doesn't require end-users handling wallet private keys nor providing proof of IRL identity.
What is exciting about project rain is that there are currently over 500,000 active BOINC users and 4 million total registered BOINC users to whom you could potentially distribute your choice of asset.
There are currently 36 supported cryptocurrencies.
The project is pretty much ready to go live, I'm just waiting for improvements to the BOINC password hashing mechanism before proceeding to production.
https://github.com/grctest/project-rain-site
I just thought of something.
If this project exist, and BOINC work can be rewarded as many other cryptocurrencies.
Gridcoin will surely lose interest in it, don't you think?
Or maybe I don't get it...
Ideally Gridcoin would become the base BOINC cryptocurrency that everyone attempts to earn whilst earning multiple other BOINC assets at the same time.
The idea is that when project rain is released, there won't just be the one asset (Gridcoin) being distributed for your BOINC computation but rather like.. 10+.
On one hand it could push Gridcoin to the side, but on the other hand if there's no team requirement you could be earning both assets and you could be selling the non-GRC asset rather than selling GRC. If there's a significant amount of new users drawn to BOINC to earn cryptocurrency then that should be good for Gridcoin.
Ultimately, I pursued this idea because the removal of the team requirement in the Gridcoin network is unlikely - project rain makes DPOR potentially possible across 36 different cryptocurrencies.
Wow, this sounds great. And the github issue thread is quite active.
I really hope this will be implemented soon ! :)
Super-node/Full-node project (Commercial project idea)
It's important to run full node clients for your cryptocurrency, but for most cryptocurrencies there is no reward mechanism for running a full node.
An interesting idea for a BOINC project would be to distribute a docker unit containing a (verified secure) cryptocurrency full node client. This wouldn't just be for a single cryptocurrency but for multiple cryptocurrencies (bitcoin, litecoin, ethereum, etc..) - customers could pay to have more computing resources dedicated to running full nodes for a set period of time & the majority of fees could be distributed to those running the full nodes.
The main difficulty would be ensuring that the full node client ports were not blocked - there would need to be a benchmark/verification stage checking full connectivity (verifying full node capability). Secondary difficulty would be deciding how to reward users - bandwidth/connections/uptime etc.
It would be very cool to collaborate with the 21.CO guys - they already distribute rewards to users for running their software, perhaps they would be interested in distributing out their software to tens of thousands of new users?
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Suchflex has begun distributing Bitcoin full nodes: https://keepingstock.net/easiest-way-to-run-a-bitcoin-full-node-91b7687af853#.e6c87cwuu
A full node BOINC project could be for all the supported cryptocurrencies in project rain (36 cryptos).
More info: https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@gridcoinman/suchflex-s-distributed-computing-app-to-incentivize-operators-of-full-bitcoin-nodes-core-unlimited-classic-xt
Google's Tensorflow - Distributed Machine Intelligence
TensorFlow has recently released distributed computing support, an enterprising prospective BOINC project administrator could create a TensorFlow BOINC project in which a customer submits machine learning code to be distributed onto thousands of CPUs/GPUs/phones for a fee of which 95% would be distributed to the project's crunchers and 5% taken for the project maintenance costs.
Since TensorFlow is a Google/Alphabet product, it might bring some serious attention to BOINC/Gridcoin.
#TensorFlow #ArtificialIntelligence #Google
This.
I can crunch BOINC 24/7 for weeks without problems, but I can't train my TensorFlow model faster than my computer allows it.
If it can be done in a way that I can "accumulate" resources in the form of GRC to then exchange it for real resources, it will drag LOTS of attention from the machine learning community. There is nothing like this out there.
It would be pretty neat, eh?
I wonder what machine learning models people would submit to such a project? (SkyNet? :P)
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Mobile sensor networks
Distributed mobile sensor network would be run on android phones, and ran using the htc power to give open source android app.
If it was a very low power usage, then we could have it regularly grab data for collecting a lot of anonymous data that everyone would have access to.
- Lets say you wanted everyone to scan something for research - oranges for example. You pay the project to distribute a work unit where everyone around the world goes and scans their nearest orange.. The customer gets in return for payment tens of thousands of scans of whatever they want. Project takes a small fee for hosting service, rest of payment goes to users.
- With the above, you could distribute work units to find contaminated food products in geographical areas, or work out the pollution affecting food in areas.
You could make a commercial boinc project, taking payment and rewarding users for their participation in gridcoin for a SCiO sensor network (https://www.consumerphysics.com/).Related BOINC projects:
Radiation@Home: http://radioactiveathome.org/boinc/ Quake Catcher Network: http://quakecatcher.net/
Radiation@Home was not added to the whitelist in the past due to geigercounters being unavailable for the team.
QCN was previously not whitelisted due to GEO-location privacy concerns.
Both could be added to the whitelist in the future.
Anyone know of a good weather kit that could be used? Something open source, cheap and available?
Air quality sensor networks
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/05/air-pollution-particles-linked-to-alzheimers-found-in-human-brai/
http://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-have-finally-figured-out-what-caused-london-s-deadly-fog
TOR/I2P/Proof-Of-Bandwidth
Similar to the super-node/full-node project, distributing daemons which provide a decentralized anonymous network resources (computing power + bandwidth).
Difficulties would mainly revolve around how to reward proof-of-bandwidth. I believe that there was an official TOR whitepaper on a backing cryptocurrency, so the company/team behind TOR are probably interested in this.
Perhaps you'd have to worry about your volunteers/workers getting in trouble for running a TOR/I2P/Other node (not unheard of that someone will get in trouble for doing so), so perhaps a minimum age would be required for the project..
Can you think of a similar decentralized network that could benefit from a project like this?
#TOR #I2P #Privacy
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Opensim/Hypergrid servers
http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Hypergrid http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Grid_List
Imagine we distributed Opensim docker containers and linked them together via Hypergrid. Users would need to prioritise up-time and perhaps there would need to be a minimum computer spec for this to be feasible.
Customers could rent land within the opensim servers & these fees could be distributed to those running the opensim servers.
Additionally, there is currently no in-game cryptocurrency, only centralised payment options. You could integrate cryptocurrency to increase usage of Gridcoin/Steem/SBD within the servers for in-game items or property.
http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Economy http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Money http://forge.opensimulator.org/gf/project/currency/
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Bitshares liquidity project
Problem: Bitshares MPA/UIA have low liquidity.
Solution: Distributing market making software (liquidity bot) to volunteers via BOINC.
Difficulties: Distributing market-making/liquidity software to volunteers without providing the volunteers the ability to steal funds from the work units.
Incentives: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,21544.0.html It's possible that this could be a commercial BOINC project in which the Bitshares community pays for MPA liquidity via this project.
Software:
Notes:
Posted this idea to the bitsharestalk liquidity thread: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,21544.msg297685.html#msg297685
Here.
And here.This project idea was previously discussed with @linouxis9:
BARK: Distributing Apache Spark over BOINC
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cse400/CSE400_2015_2016/reports/report_32.pdf http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cse400/CSE400_2015_2016/posters/poster_32.pdf
We've attempted to contact the students who worked on BARK, they have graduated so we need to contact them via social media (we believe we've found 2 of them, they work for google and mongodb - pretty smart dudes!).
Also mentioned here: https://cryptocointalk.com/topic/10694-brainstorm-session-ideas-for-boinc-projects/?p=221090
#BigData #Java #Scala #Python
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Full decentralization of a BOINC web server
There's certainly been attempts at decentralizing a BOINC project's storage in the past, but as far as I'm aware there has yet to be a fully decentralized BOINC project.
Do you think it could be possible? Especially if we were to scale back the web server (remove features).
Related research
Optimizing the data distribution layer of BOINC with BitTorrent.
Attic: A Case Study for Distributing Data in BOINC Projects.
Extending the BOINC architecture using peer-to-peer application code exchange.
Golem Project.
I reckon www.sia.tech might qualify as doing that, the working files would be centralised but they could be backed up to acheive the resiliency.
Yeah but that's still just decentralized storage, it wouldn't decentralize the server (as in like, a P2P server).
We really need to discuss the ethics of a decentralized BOINC server.
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~~~ embed:gridcoin/comments/59yjsb/brainstorming_new_boinc_projects_steemit/ reddit metadata:fGdyaWRjb2lufGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LnJlZGRpdC5jb20vci9ncmlkY29pbi9jb21tZW50cy81OXlqc2IvYnJhaW5zdG9ybWluZ19uZXdfYm9pbmNfcHJvamVjdHNfc3RlZW1pdC98 ~~~
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Not sure if it is necessarily an idea for a BOINC project but maybe it could fit into your project rain idea, cm.How about a tipping platform for scientific papers where you can tip grc. For example publishers on https://arxiv.org/ could somehow register, identify and get some GRC.
I like the idea.
We could approach arxiv, and similar journals to get gridcoin accepted for site donations at least. The websites would probably have to get involved. Perhaps if you have a verifiable (journal website) account and were able to link it to a CPID (which is then linked to 36 different cryptocurrency address fields) then it could be done.
If a journal website was to add a CPID field to their publicly viewable profile then we could scrape this to create a distribution vector.
Perhaps a project which managed to link 'journal-identity:CPID' could use 'paper count' and 'citation count' as a credit system (rewarding RAC), then it could be added to the neural network and continuously reward these researchers Gridcoin from now on.
A secondary work unit could be verified paper peer reviews in order to provide researchers who peer review papers a continuous distribution of GRC?
Perhaps researchers could be provided an internal governance regarding prioritizing research subject areas to receive more RAC than other subjects. You could weight voting weight by paper-count | citation-count, however this could potentially be gamed - further contemplation is required on this matter.
I'd imagine that a significant quantity of papers submitted to these journals don't have an email address or up to date contact details, so if you were to try to send coins to them how would they be notified? Likewise, a significant quantity of authors may no longer be alive :(
It could be negatively received like spam if it went out via email to tens of thousands of users, we'd need to tread lightly.
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We should make a distributed SIP-style burst communication mesh network for encrypted communications.
...did i use enough buzzwords?
The idea is to have people act as servers for a ZRTP-encrypted free phone network, that you can't record, because it isn't coming from one source.
Obviously some kinks to work out, but worth doing.
http://www.whoishostingthis.com/blog/2015/03/09/start-your-own-isp/
https://prism-break.org/en/protocols/zrtp/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burst_transmission
ipfs.io/ipfs/QmNhFJjGcMPqpuYfxL62VVB9528NXqDNMFXiqN5bgFYiZ1/its-time-for-the-permanent-web.html
https://torrentfreak.com/popular-youtuber-experiments-with-webtorrent-to-beat-censorship-160930/
There was a project a guy was starting on a thing I watched in 2014... from a Facebook app for Opinion Stage... it was called "Would you participate in a distributed sensor array?"
There was a video showing how to make an rf antenna for like $25 USD, and the idea was to have like 6 antennae placed around your yard, as well as being attached to a distributed global network of such... and together you would monitor the radio and other waves and their distribution.
I wonder if he was "silenced".
Fuck it. I say let's get it going again. :)
Epiphany-V: A 1024-core 64-bit RISC processor project (Distributed Task Farm)
https://www.parallella.org/2016/10/05/epiphany-v-a-1024-core-64-bit-risc-processor/ https://www.parallella.org/2016/11/14/task-farms-on-the-epiphany/
So these chips can scale to 1 Billion cores in a single system.. we should seriously consider an Epiphany-V BOINC project. It would require its own project because it would likely be incompatible with existing projects.
There has been some skepticism as to whether or not these processors would be useful for any real-world gain, or if they were a "test-bench" so to speak, for somebody wanting to play with the framework of a supercomputer... to write code for one or whatever. I hope to open discussion further with some recent findings:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3127176/hardware/adaptevas-1024-core-epiphany-v-mega-chip-packs-serious-wallop.html
According to this, the chips will be good for real-time image processing. Perhaps Asteroids@home could actually make some use of this... or possibly the beginning of a new project comparing images for transitory planets? Could even be useful for the burst communication project I was talking about... I have been scouring for some code related to finding JUST voice on an audio track... but it just doesn't really exist yet. It would apparently be quite lucrative as well, seeing as phone companies could use it to lower bandwidth usage.
Even some kind of distributed test project to see what kind of user-coded projects they are able to handle? Could be dangerous, but we could have people run their codes at home, and submit success stories to a forum or something.
I would like to discuss involving Affero somehow.
http://www.affero.org/
Affero is an open-source license (AGPL), but they are also a part of some pretty interesting stuff...
From site: "Affero combines a peer based reputation system with a commerce system. It enables individuals to rate other individuals and make payments on their behalf. The rating system could be compared to the karma system provided on slashdot, although all member have equal access to rate others. Basically, any person can rate another person's contribution.
Also, the system doesn't come bundled with any particular forum or community platform, so any independent community host can integrate the services and individuals can share reputation across various communities."
That all sounds like stuff we are looking for... maybe we could come up with some kind of distributed blockchain licensing system? Like Dragonchain, but not made by Disney..? ;)
I-LOFAR
https://sites.google.com/site/lofarireland/home