Great post! Thanks for putting this all together.
Question:
All projects share a reward pool of 115 000 magnitude shares, equally distributed.
That... seems odd to me. Doesn't that imply all projects are equally valuable to the world? Given this approach, it seems to make sense to always pick the least popular project because your influence there will be the greatest. Is that true? I get the point of Gridcoin and BOINC isn't just to provide rewards, but it seems to me the reward mechanism is backwards. Seems to me, the best projects should have the best share. Am I missing something? If someone's just getting started, should they focus on obscure projects? Also, is it pointless to try and do DPOR on a laptop or do you really need a beefy machine and/or graphics card/mining rig set up?
So far, I'm loving the concept of this. Makes so much more sense then wasting electricity for proof of work. I hope more people get involved in this, both by purchasing Gridcoin to increase the incentive to mine and by mining BOINC to improve the world.
Thanks again!
You're partially correct. All projects are equally valuable to the world in the eyes of the Gridcoin network. Who would be the one deciding what project should get more and who should get less and on what grounds? Is searching for Asteroids less valuable than medical treatments, or new improved mathematical calculations less valuable than scanning signals from outer space?
You could pick the "least popular project" but since everyone could do that it wouldn't be the least popular pretty soon and Gridcoin has succeeded in the splendid art of redistributing the computational power that the project otherwise might not have gotten.
All whitelisted projects, you mean. Equality is a nice idea, but it's not entirely obtainable unless we tell ourselves certain stories. I agree it's quite difficult to measure the value of these projects because we as a species don't have systems for valuing life, existence, consciousness, etc. That said, I do think it's worthwhile to at least attempt to rank things according to some framework. Does it increase wellbeing of conscious creatures? Stuff like that.
Either way, I think it's a pretty awesome idea, and I'm having fun learning more about it. :)