@CM-Steem from the #Gridcoin community confirming intent to attend the 220th BeyondBitcoin (WhaleTank) hangout episode!

About Gridcoin

Gridcoin is a cryptocurrency which securely rewards BOINC computation on top of proof of stake.

What's BOINC? BOINC is an open-source volunteer distributed computing platform which utilizes the spare computer resources on 500k+ computers to attempt to cure diseases, map the milkyway, search for extraterrestrial life, and any other kind of distributable computation.

Anyone who needs a serious amount of distributed computing power (100k+ CPUs) almost entirely for free can create a BOINC project to create a distributed cloud service of their own desire (fairly easily) whilst the Gridcoin network potentially rewards your project's volunteers on your behalf.

I shall be covering the following topics:

Gridcoin giveaway on the Bitshares network!

Gridcoin is supported on the Bitshares DEX as OPEN.GRC (Openledger Exchanged Backed Asset).

I've sent ~$100 (3500) in OPEN.GRC to fuzzy for distribution to attendees & speakers within this hangout!

Trading

• In the last week, Gricoin has been trading at approximately $0.03/GRC.
• Gridcoin is currently listed ranked 41st on Coingecko!
• When filtering Coinmarketcap by non-premined/non-minable, Gridcoin is ranked 52nd!

Community

• Team Gridcoin has now achieved the 1st place ranking for all-time historical BOINC computation! It has taken us just 3 years to catch up to the last 2 decades of completed BOINC computation!
  • Likewise, we have increased our FormulaBOINC ranking significantly!
• Despite our reduced marketcap we're continuing to observing a growing userbase within the Telegram, Slack and Steemit communities.
• We now have a 'WeChat' Gridcoin group for the Chinese community, don't hesitate to join:
• The 2017 BOINC Workshop has been announced for September 6th-8th in Paris at the Institude for Astrophysics. It is being attended by many key BOINC members, and will be incredibly valuable for the community & BOINC's future development.
• We have continued holding Gridcoin community hangouts on a fortnightly basis, the next hangout is the 37th hangout on the 19th Aug (Saturday at 9PM BST (compare to your timezone!)). Everyone's welcome to join in!

Development

Security Research Paper

A team of security researchers has published a paper on the security of Gridcoin, it was presented at the 'WOOT '17 USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies' a few days ago.

There was a breakdown in communication which led to the security researchers publishing the paper without the full development team's awareness of the issues they had found. We are changing the official website to improve ease of reporting security issues.

The issues mentioned are:

• The ability to manipulate/steal DPOR rewards - This vulnerability was discovered by one of our devs & patched prior to the paper's release.
• Hijacking beacons (stealing an user's CPID registration) - We have reduced the ease of performing this attack in previous updates, an attacker now has a smaller beacon attack window & we plan to hopefully eliminate the need for beacons in the future.
• The ability to exfiltrate user's email addresses from the blockchain - unfortunately still present, we hope to remove obfuscated code in favour of more secure code. Whilst this isn't great, the team founders have always had access to the list of emails within the BOINC projects (unless explicitly hidden).

Related articles

• "The Good"
• "The Bad"

Superblock stability status

Superblocks in Gridcoin help track BOINC user statistics to base the reward mechanism upon.

During July we encountered several superblock issues which interrupted the reward mechanism, after several leisure updates we have significantly improved the stability of the reward mechanism. We are continuing to investigate additional improvements.

Leisure client updates released!

See full changelogs

• Fix syncing & startup crash issues
• RPC command additions & enhancements.
• Multiple GUI related improvements
• Dependency upgrades
• Improved translations: Lithuanian, Russian, Swedish and Chinese and various other Countries
• Buffer overflow protection, removal of unnecessary code, improved thread safety.
• Reduction in high CPU utilization
• Multiple staking mechanism improvements
• Optimized ARM builds

Gridcoin developers are continuing to work on new features such as:

• Improved staking mechanism (V8) - If anyone's interested in helping out test the new client please do head into the development channel on slack.
• Improved beacon & email security mechanisms (regarding the recently published Gridcoin security research paper).
• Improved GUI & branding
• Introduction of autotools for improved gridcoin builds.
• Removal of the mandatory team requirement within the Gridcoin network.