GRC Supplementary Developments Proposal
The way I see this project, is making a Google Cloud / AWS / IBM Bluemix / Microsoft Azure alternative, on the blockchain
Recently i started with some contributions, as much my time and knowledge can support. Now once we have Web Wallet and Android App alpha capable of making wallets, providing users with private keys and supports GRC transaction, it’s time to move forward with the plan to make the Ecosystem self-sustainable and growing.
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This is what I will be working on, but due to amount of work needed I strongly encourage developers to join me in making what’s next. And in my opinions, it should not be SPARC with a for-profit company behind making what's next, it should be Gridcoin Team, that stays open-source and already created a good ground for this proposal to be realistic.
In my opinion, managing to complete the following roadmap proposal of supplementary development, we are making a self-sustainable ecosystem.
PROPOSAL:
- Fork BOINC / BAM
- Perform total Re-Disign to make it appealing and in-line with all these “fancy” new age websites. (Note, I am first who still uses nano and joe text editors, but will need to make it into a product-like ). So it needs to be Clean and Simple.
- Separate ‘researchers’ registration from commercial ‘buyers’ of cloud computing power.
- Add ability for buyers to deploy WU’s and make some templates.
- Make WU’s slight specification changes, following both WU specification but making it backwards compatible with VMWare Vapp standards, allowing inter-compatibility with cloud computing providers. (current VirtualBox compatibility will be of great help since it’s already supported).
- Send coupons for all the academic institutions with ‘life-time free of charge registration’ for their WU’s.
- Send 300 USD coupons to commercial companies and organizations once we are stable enough encouraging them to test the platform.
- Spend everything earned by selling commercial distributed computing power to buy GRC on exchangers, making the GRC highly liquid and in demand, and as a result naturally raise the price trough demand and offer. (Automate this process). This spending should be done to a "null" address, or an address without private key for the purposes for these GRC to be burned. Also, burning the proportional amount should be a required part in order for WU to get whitelisted for rewards.
Comments are welcome, participation even more :)
I'll keep this post updated with the development status and achieved roadmaps.
Thanks,
Stefan
I do not support running Virtual machines on volunteer computers. They give their spare computational power in hope that it will be useful, and wasted on running a hyper-visor.
I do support changing standard for WUs (applications). The current boinc standard/api is just too clumsy even to the point that some projects opt to create wrapper apps.
Make the crunching capability of Gridsters more accessibe for one-off or commercial computation? Definitely. It takes far too long to set up boinc projects, fight the app cofig, plans, etc and get the project whitelisted.
It needs to be fast and straightforward. Candidates should be presented with, first a guide on how to make their app compatible with boinc/gridcoin and then a place to submit their app and WUs.
There will be some base, low reward for crunching those WUs, community can decide on more reward by whitelist voting or the candidate them-self can pay up if they either want more power or just reward+support grc.
Hi tomasbrod,
I agree VBox as Hypervisor is very wasteful when it comes to resources, so I am currently experimenting with VMWare Vapp implementation which is an "app level" hypervisor rather then os level.
I'll need to do a lot of tests, but so far this technology looks promising. Especially when it comes to inter-compatibility with other platforms as most of them support this. At the moment, it's industry-wide accepted standard.
Without allowing ease of migration for customers, we are unlikely to attract businesses. In my opinion, two key factors are in play:
It's unlikely i will be close to initial testing version of Vapp in less then 2 weeks based on documentation examined so far. The more I read, more problems starts to pop-out, but i guess that's the rock'n'roll we like to live with.
I was searching on the topic of how to compute in cloud, but I could not find relevant guide. What I have to do for my "thing" to become "vApp"?
In order to serve customers, their needs must be identified.
What they have?
What they want?
What they want to do themselves?, eg: installing the app, logging with ssh, filling database with data.
What they want from the provider (us)?, eg: running a bunch of VM images, providing a VPS, guaranteed up-time and reliability, serving downloads or running this program million of times (with different inputs) and collecting the results.
@tomasbrod, i am currently examining and making a list of what Google App Engine / Azure and Bluemix offers. Out of that list, i am going to separate, what's relatively easy to do, what's problematic, and what's impossible. I think it's a good starting point.
As for the Vapps, the standards differs from service to service, but you can look into it as "app level hypervisor" rather then os level. For example, you can deploy mysql on the OS, or as an Vapp. In second case, only the core requirements of an app are virtualized. To make it to the simplest level for the purpose of explanation, such virtualized system would not have anything other then what's required to run mysql. No ssh, not even bash. It's a way to save overhead that OS level virtualization comes with, as well allowing ease of migration. However that's just brief descriptions.
Sounds more appropriate as a commercial BOINC project than a direction for the entirety of Gridcoin to take.
The BOINC client/server is open source, BAM is closed source, GRCPOOL is open source & David Anderson's 'TBD' client is open source too.
I agree, that's why it's supplemental development proposal. As for the BAM, that's what I am currently working on. Debuging API from tcpdumps in order to re-create our library for the same purpose. I will definitely look into Anderson's client as well. Thanks for pointing me @cm-steem
This is a bold but detailed proposal and I really like it. I also perceive Gridcoin project in current state as being incomplete
and I see a need for a custom BOINC fork.
Every sophisticated product / service (and blockchain is one of them) needs own, proper ecosystem. One of the main sources of Apples' success was ecosystem around ipods and iphones, Bitcoin has the largest and richest ecosystem among cryptos (ATMs, exchanges etc.). A rich, easy to use ecosystem is a key difference between niche / hobby project and widely used technology.
@hobit I read your article before coming to this proposal, and in some way your article also took a part to point me into this direction of thinking. However there are some good points/questions happening at the moment of typing this on SLACK, so i'll update the project proposal as soon as we manage to clarify possible problems that arrises with this approach.
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STOPThis is fascinating, because I believe that this is exactly the sort of path (maybe not this exact path, but something similar!) that Gridcoin will end up taking in the future. While this specific proposal will most likely fade away (nothing personal, just requires massive effort and thus has low odds of success ), the best part about distributed open-source software is that nothing really prevents someone with sufficient motivation and resources from making something like this happen. Doesn't really require anyone else's approval or cooperation, just a vision and the hard work and funding (from whatever source) to pull it off.
And at that stage, we're essentially out-Golem-ing Golem and the other would-be distributed computing crypo-tokens while being an actual blockchain and hopefully still having some value for people who don't or can't actually crunch BOINC projects.:)
Point being, these types of posts excite me, because eventually somebody will pull it off. It'll be fun to see who that is.
@nateonthenet, although i am relatively shortly involved into Gridcons, if you check my previous posts, you will see that this probably is not going to fade-away. I am going to do it alone if needed, although it would be nice to have additional pairs of hands as much as possible :)
For sure, it does not require approval, but it does requires opinions and work-force, which is again form of approval :) Thanks for yours mate!
Looking forward to following this project.
Question.
Under this system, would my cousin Carl be able to use gridcoin to crunch some data him and his kid put together with a hundred citizen scientists around the world, or would he have to buy Gridcoin to compute? Or how do you envision elementary schools using the Gridcoin network in this system?
@jringo Idea is to give scientist for free. Maybe even to people, but charge companies only. Of-course, companies would need much more resources and enterprise grade product following some industry standards of quality, so we can easy make separate products, free for citizens / scientists / institutions and paid for businesses.
Also the input money for businesses to buy computing power is not GRC only, - it's any monetary note, crypto or not. The output for researchers who execute tasks is GRC.
Now goes the "economy trick" part. We use that money from companies and buy GRC with that money. This is where we create so called "value difference", leading for GRC price to jump up due to market demand. (And we are supporting and creating that demand by exchanging other currencies into GRC).
'trick' sounds sneaky, it seems to be basically broad service / product / money interchange system (or simply economy).
@hobit the "trick" is a very sneaky one, but it's used as an economy tool in regular economies of the countries to prevent inflation and raise the value of currency if it's devaluated. The best example of using such tool in crypto-market are promotional posts on steemit here (to promote post, you send to null address).
Without such 'tricks' any currency (real of virtual) can't climb to real market potential, although empowering such tricks too much lead into another set of problems.
That kind of tools should be tweaked by people who know much more about the economy then me. What I do know however, is that the price of GRC is very devaluated, maybe even 10 times. It's relatively easy to tell by observing dependence (or independence in this case) on other currencies and market change.
the "trick" you're referring to is used because fiat fails regularly. inflating a price by artificially creating demand is ultimately self defeating. that's one reason why crypto was made in the first place. we will likely not need to use the economic tricks of fiat in a global digital micro-transaction multi-currency economy (buzzwords for googling).
i think there is potential to this project, but please be careful.
@jringo there is a small difference between artificially creating demand and 'converting a demand for product into a demand for currency', these are very separated things.
Here, we are burning real money converted into GRC and then burned, so it's not artificial, but "projected value" that's burned, and more important "projected" against demand of product that relies on main currency within the economy of the product itself.
I needed to explain the difference.
But i do agree it needs to be done very carefully, and not by me, by someone who knows much more.