RE: Time and Work Based Model for GridCoin Reward Mechanism
Nice post! How are you thinking the benchmarking could happen securely? One could imagine unscrupulous individuals skewing the inter-project or inter-hardware conversion factors by running on poorly configured or extremely overclocked hardware. (Or by faking their hardware altogether, although that's a different issue.)
The situation seems to be this. We want conversion factors between hardware and projects to get a fair credit rewarding system. This could be done in a centralized manner, within the projects themselves or by community-approved individuals; or in a decentralized manner, as you and @ilikechocolate have been exploring. While the centralized solution has its own problems, the decentralized solution certainly must demonstrate that it is robust again a minority of unscrupulous network participants.
That's the tough part. Ideally, maybeBOINC project admin and Gridcoin Foundation would run several reference computers with known specs so 'everyone' could re-check. Thus hardware should be quite affordable, consumer not prosumer grade, and popular, so easy to purchase.
I consider my model to be rather on centralized, not de-centralized side, or maybe in-between.
We could think of a decentralized model where blockchain would reward those who are closest to max-RAC... or something like that.
We are looking how to optimise system built on quite broken BOINC reward system and partial data available... It's quite hopeless to build on bad foundations. We should either have partnership with BOINC developers or have our own distribution of BOINC platform.
Still, with reference computers we could get maybe the closest its possible to optimal rewarding.
Got it. So your proposal is more along the centralized lines. We already put a certain amount of trust in project admins, so having them run reference hardware (which anyone could double-check) is not a huge stretch from the current implementation.
I definitely agree with this for the long-term! In the short-term, hopefully we can at least find a partial solution.