Gridcoin Goes to University - proposal
There is a saying:
nothing exists in a vacuum
Things coexist, interact and form ecosystems. Blockchain based projects form alliances and cooperate with other organizations. To name just a few:
- Stellar Network - IBM
- Cardano - University of Edinburgh
- Dash - just announced a partnership with Arizona State University
Gridcoin Research, whilst it is more focused on science than most of other projects, has very little ties with scientific institutions. While it relies on BOINC, there is very little cooperation between the two.
I propose to form an alliance with one of the universities in a form of funding a research grant. We should focus on Central and East Europe, like Poland, Czechia, Lithuania, Hungary, Ukraine as:
- education levels in those countries is very high
- costs I expect to be much lower than in USA, UK or Germany
We could approach first University of Warsaw (universe@home) or Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (VGTU), as they run BOINC projects and we could benefit from the synergy effects.
The open question is what we would expect in return for the funds. It could be Gridcoin blockchain security research, improvements in the protocol - our devs will have better and more detailed ideas.
We could benefit from the funding mainly in two areas:
- development
- marketing
Last but not least, we should engage more in BOINC development itself.
EDIT:
Dash funds in ASU will be allocated as follows:
The Dash Scholars Program, which provides $100,000 in scholarships for undergraduate and graduate research fellowships;
Research lab and Industry open source projects, providing an additional $100,000 in funding for ASU’s Blockchain Research Lab (BRL) and $50,000 in new funding for the Luminosity Lab, and
Blockchain course development, with $100,000 for creating an online graduate course expected to be offered at ASU this fall.
The $350,000 is funded by Dash, via a successful treasury proposal. Director of ASU’s Blockchain Research Lab,
I believe we could be able to fund a similar program in one of the mentioned countries for $100,000 or less.
Sounds like a great idea, I would be in to donate 10% of whatever GRC I have at the time for this! However, I think it might be a better idea to rather fund another natural science and maybe be "rewarded" by mentioning Gridcoin in publications rather than just funding Computer science projects. This for several reasons:
If I am completely off with the points, correct me. I am not a computer scientist (chemist - cooler) and if a CS could really bring a huge leap forward, that would obviously be great too! I think the question then simply is: Do we want Gridcoin to be developed or promoted?
ad 1) university partnership is an idea unrelated to paying current / future developers;
ad 2) This is what I wish to discuss, thanks for sharing your view. Demands not necessarily mean a request for a specific 'product'; but is seems pointless to sponsor something 100% unrelated to blockchain technology & Gridcoin project.
ad3) I'm not so optimistic, I think Gridcoin is very little known. Also we could attract new blood (new developers). As for chemists/physicists/biologists/engineers - it's a good point. We could maybe rich further in those environments by sponsoring some BOINC projects. Here comes another idea: We could have a fund made of two parts - one part would be equally divided and each (willing) whitelisted project would receive its chunk; second part would be awarded by community to favourite projects as an extra boost. Do you have other ideas how to reach to chemists, physicists etc?
Maybe something to add to my third point: Personally, I am really into Gridcoin because I can really relate to the scientists sending the WU out and getting their research computed without having to build a supercomputer like the university does that I go to - Switzerland has that kind of money. I think that the amount of people we could reach and get interested in getting their own projects crunched or crunching WUs for Boinc/earning GRC might be larger with all the classical natural sciences compared to computer science.
I just thought about funding a scholarship. It just came from the top of my head, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense to me.
If we fund a researcher - lets say a computational chemist - we pay for this person, their workspace, their equipment and so on. If we fund a student - lets say a masters degree (1.5 years) we "only" have to pay for their living. Here in Switzerland at my university, there are scholarships for ~24000.- CHF (~24000 USD / 21000 EUR) for a masters degree. That money is supposed to pay for university fees, a room to live in, etc... It should be approximately enough to fund the 1.5-2 years of doing a masters degree. In eastern European countries, this money could be half as much or even less I guess. So for lets say 15000$ (maybe 10000$) per year, we finance the studies of a young scientist who will tell everyone that he is supported by Gridcoin.
I think everyone, during their studies, at least reads about the different scholarships their university has and reads up on the organisations behind them (I did that and I know all my colleagues did). If Gridcoin now provided a masters scholarship for technical subjects for 10-15k USD per year for 5 years (so 5 scholarships), that would cost about 50-75k USD. If we have 10000 students at a technical university getting in touch with the name Gridcoin and reading about it (not counting professors, researchers, guests etc.) for 5 years, that would easily reach 30000 scientists within that timeframe who (if they are somewhat like me) immediately jump on the Gridcoin-train (I know, that is too optimistic).
I think this is the target community of Gridcoin, as natural scientists usually already know at least some programming/handling a PC and can get into Gridcoin fairly easily if they want to and support the idea.
We could support a young
etc, I like it.
There is also the possibility of funding a graduate student award (maybe something like $10,000 US per year), which would be a fortune in some of these countries.
I support and am happy to help form partnerships with universities.
Interesting idea. The question that remains is: Do we have enough money for such a partnership?
If I recall properly, there is over 30 million GRC in the Foundation Fund worth over $3 mln as of today. Spending up to 10% or so on development this year would be the best possible investment.
Keep in mind this would cause deflation of the value. Thats a huge amount of money to be sold, if done in a bad time it would totally crash the economy of the coin.
I'm not talking about selling all foundation funds, only a tiny part. Also, we don't know the impact until we do it. Maybe it would rather bring value up than down? Also there is such a solution: if we sell 1M GRC - we have over 11 000 miners, if 1 in 10 would buy 1000 GRC in average we could easily accommodate this extra supply to markets. Also, several whales have millions in their wallets and nobody has any say what and when they will do.
Well, im not buying 1000GRC at market price thats sure.
My point was just that nobody will want to invest in a currency whose managers keep deflating for paying for stuff. It wouldnt be too different than the ECB printing more euros to pay for greece debt, not necesarily a bad move, but i sure as hell wouldnt want to hold into much liquid money.
First, why to invest at all? Current value is speculative and anticipates potential future value. Where this value will come from?
ECB analogy is not good. Those GRCs are already 'printed' and stored in the foundation addresses.
Gridcoin needs development - currently it can only accommodate less than 10k solo miners, there is team requirement to be removed etc. We have funds and they should be spent wisely.
Indeed, but they shouldnt be freely distributed. If they need FIAT, they ought to search for particular buyers who would not dump them inmediatly . If they need manpower, they ought to give the grc directly to the participants, because they will probably hold as they are invested on the project.
What if we converted into a lump sum which would then get invested as part of the university's endowment which would still generate income irrespective of the grc market. I think most scholarships are arranged this way.
This is excellent Idea. If you can build an 'official material' to approach with, I would be happy to open a discussion within the University of Belgrade. It's an old and credible one, especially in field of Math and Computer Sciences.
Dont forget GPUgrid or Tn-Grid. They are spanish (catalonian independence seems unlikely) and italian.
I like this idea. I've toyed with the idea of pitching Gridcoin to my adviser (I'm a PhD student) as a way to supply compute power to his research group. On the other hand, I'm not sure his research group is big enough to warrant a separate grant just for Gridcoin. I think it's a good idea to start with the research groups that already have a BOINC presence.
One should note that there are probably restrictions on what government grants can fund. For instance, I kind of doubt that a grant would be allowed to fund marketing. But research on integrating the blockchain with computational science certainly could fall under the grant category.
So what's the plan of action? Run a poll to assess support from the wider community?