Opinion: Incentivising BOINC
Recently there was a descision from PrimeGrid that they no longer wanted to allow monetization of BOINC credit on their project, I dont want to misrepresent anything, so here is the link to their announcement and the thread that followed.
I respect their descision in terms of they want to ensure their results arent skewed by people hungry for GRC doing anything and everything to get credits from their project.
However
And yes its a BIG HOWEVER from me, I do feel that the PrimeGrid project descision, would be very detremental to BOINC if it were to follow through to other projects. Why?
Back in the dayz
Lets wind back to when I, and probably a lot of other BOINC participants started crunching. You had a computer, you were using maybe 5% of its capacity if you were really lucky. Most of the time it was doing nothing much of value.
You see BOINC and it speaks to you, why not give your 95%+ spare computing capacity to help science, its a no-brainer right? Its charitable giving, that effectively cost you nothing. Where do I sign up?
Fast forward to the present
10 years ago Bitcoin happened. I actually heard about it reasonably early on, and I possibly could have mined some of the blocks on my computer that was doing BOINC (speculative, but lets go with it), but Id rather do BOINC than make some Magic Internet Money that was the reserve of some odd people.
But todays landscape is different, crypto-currency has captured the imagination of many people with computer equipment, or the knowledge/desire to learn. So the decision I made back in 2005 or whenever it was to do BOINC, isnt the same descision as is faced by people today. If I were making that descision now, would I have chosen crypto-currency mining, or BOINC?
Would I chose money, or science?
Maybe (ok probably) Im a little weird, and perhaps with no prior knowledge I still might go for science, but lets be realistic, your average person available for BOINC or crypto mining, I think has a much higher chance of going for the latter.
So what?
People and hardware dont last forever; your BOINCers of today, at some point need to be replaced with new participants, and that is just to stay at the rather un-inspirational static participation level. If we truly believe in distributed computing, then we should be aiming for mass adoption well beyond current levels, shouldnt we?
But BOINC is always supposed to be free
Is it, I dont think thats what BOINC is a all, look at the homepage, its got "It can be used for commercial purposes, and applications need not be open source." listed right there! But I take the point. If you want to keep distributed computing for free science though, you need to recognise not only the threat from other money making methods, but that several projects have their aim to make distributed computing a paid for marketplace; Golem and SONM amongst others are creating paid-for-compute distributed computing marketplaces.
So now you not only have to decide between distributed computing and other things to use up your compute resources (that could make you money), but there are a number of ways to do both at the same time.
As we sit today, only Gridcoin will keep BOINC free to use for science projects, but also incentivise users financially. If I can say anything to the wider BOINC community, it is that they should of course recognise the challenges, but also the opportunities that block-chain can bring, perhaps Gridcoin can help us finally beat the cheats; after all block-chain exists to allow people to trust one another across the internet. I see it as a Polaroid moment, if you are young and dont know what Polaroid was, it was a very popular method of taking near instant photographs on film, that died when digital imaging became popular.
I prefer to look for hope in new technology
I think the BOINC community as a whole needs to look at Gridcoin not as a competitor or a disruptor, but as a supporter; as a method to hold back the tide of new technologies that threaten to remove participation from BOINC altogether. That is why I have been part of Gridcoin for the long haul, and why I dont immediately sell my research rewards, Im trying to support the creation of currency, that just happens to be distributed to people who are incentivised to do good for humanity.
Can't support PrimeGrid decision. Enthusiasts are buying GRC in order to price stay afloat and thus support boinc projects including PG financially.
I guess what concerns them is they need to think twice about their credit system not to become abused by GRC-seeking cheaters.
If they asked for help it might get solved, I don't know, but maybe.
Originally the idea of BOINC was, to provide huge amounts of computing power for science projects that otherwise could not afford to get this computing power, like by renting supercomputer time or so. That did not include commercial projects, who just try to do things cheaply and make more profit that way.
The motivation (for me and most other, I guess) used to be some feeling of pride, to be part of a important science work. Like finding gravitational waves, or climate change, or dangerous asteroids. Or, at the beginning, finding alien communication.
I never expected to get payed for this. But of course it would be additional motivation, and help to cover some of the cost running BOINC.
If it would work similar to Steemit, rewarding processed work units, it would sure boost the participation. I guess it could be done somehow.
Gridcoin does exactly that, your BOINC credit is equated into a share of the daily Gridcoins rewarded.
What concerns me is that the BOINC active user-base has been declining in the last 5 years (see chart below).
(source)
Although the computational power per PC is rising, you don't want to lose any contributors and especially team Gridcoin because they provide 8% of the active users-base and 25% of the total BOINC network output (source).
For the most of them the reason of leaving is tha after 20 years of crunching NONE of the boinc project delivered anything even remotely seeming to be a scientific breakthrough.
I'm not sure you will see some miracle breakthrough. More like incremental increases in knowledge that ultimately help lead to new things. einstein@home HAS discovered numerous pulsars for what that's worth. It isn't clear to me what benefit protein folding simulations and other biology related projects like rosetta@home and World Community Grid has produced but I wouldn't presume the work has been worthless just because there hasn't been a new miracle drug. Seti@home hasn't found anything but then that one always has been and always will be a long shot.
Crunching costs money. And I doubt that donating to present day boinc project is a most effective way to donate.
Even if the alternative is feeding the dog at your door.
Or buying SP and donating upvotes to steem app developers.
I can't give you a cost/benefit comparison with other approaches of conducting research projects but the reality is that worldwide millions of people are spending billions of dollars that don't deliver any direct scientific breakthrough either.
As @darth-cryptic has mentioned above research is "incremental increases in knowledge that ultimately help lead to new things".
The difficulty with research is that there is no silver bullet to quickly fix something. In the past 20 years well over a billion dollars yearly has come from charitable donations for cancer research and still we haven't found a break-through to prevent it from happening. Should we now stop it or continue and take the knowlegde of all research results world-wide (including BOINC) to further work on a final solution?
Finally, I agree that feeding the dog or buying SP to donate upvotes to steem app developers are other ways of spending your money and fortunately everybody can decide how they feel it is spent best.
Exactly, I had heard this before but could not lay my hands on the data for the article.
If they don't want to incentivize cheating then they shouldn't be publishing statistics at all. And if there are ways to cheat without detection for long periods of time, then the project is of questionable value in the first place. It sounds like they are looking for security through obscurity which is bad because first of all that doesn't work and second of all more users is desirable, not less. Honestly, I can't even begin to understand their logic here and I can't imagine such logic would be likely to carry over to other projects.
Gridcoin: "Hey, we're going to pay users to do work for your project in an effort to get more users for you."
Primegrid: "No."
Huh?
If that's what they want to do it's their project, I'm more concerned this isn't seen as some kind of ideal.
Oh, I agree it's their project and they can do what they want. I just don't think the logic is sound which is why I'm not terribly concerned that most projects would do something similar.
Although I fully agree with you, every project can decide their approach.
We had GDRP issues with World Community Grid but we have found a solution and Gridcoin members can now happily crunch this project again. There are even projects like SR-Base that are really supporting Gridcoin and have our logo on their website.