The Gridcoin SuperComputer has a growth spurt.
Recently we have seen a lot of interest in Gridcoin, its a crypto-currency that rewards people who volunteer their computing power to projects on the BOINC platform, it is in effect a distributed supercomputer, backed with crypto.
There is an ecosystem of statistics sites around BOINC, and one of the most well known is BOINCStats, it publishes all kinds of data, and is run by Willy, who with the help of some advertising and donations pays all the costs of running the site.
So lets see whats been happening to the Gridcoin Team in the last few months:
To explain this a little more clearly, when work is completed, and validated as being correct BOINC projects give credit to the users who processed the work, we can see that there is a trend of increased output.
And here is a slightly different view:
This is a chart of RAC (Recent Average Credit) and as an average gives a cleaner view. In BOINC RAC the most recent week has a higher weight than the previous week, and so on week on week, so if you dont maintain credit output, RAC can react quite quickly.
We see that two months ago RAC was at about 250 million credit per day, now its at 350 million credit per day, thats a gain of about 40% in computing power in two months!
In overall credit scores Team Gridcoin is at number 4 spot for non-ASIC work, but we are fast approaching some of the older teams who had a head start:
It looks like number 3 spot should be in reached within 2 weeks (see the OverTake column on the right side), number 2 shortly after, then all things being equal number ONE seems inevitable.
So its all looking rosy for team Gridcoin. Its important to say that all this credit represents real scientific work of genuine value to humanity, like curing childhood cancers, AIDS, Ebola, mapping the Milky Way galaxy in 3d, running particle collision data for the Large Hadron Collider, and much, much more.
All the information is on BOINCStats, please go and take a look. While you are there you may also want to look at Willys donation page, he accepts BTC and GRC there, as well as Euro.
If you like the idea of competition, using your computer to do valuable work and getting rewarded, check out https://www.gridcoin.us or find us on steemit at https://beta.chainbb.com/forum/gridcoin
Very interesting, I think I'll start mining GridCoin soon!
Yes come on over and join us, its a nice community.
quick question. what's stopping people who do ddos activity from harnessing the power of the grid to do distributed attacks with the many nodes of such a system? is their rate limiting or something in place to stop such usage?
Each project that is rewarded with Gridcoin must be on a whitelist. Gridcoin has in block-chain voting (pretty cool!) so the community decides what gets rewarded, and stuff like you describe is unlikley to pass that vote.
I guess you could make a BOINC project to DDOS, but as no-one is compelled to attach their computer to the project, I doubt it would be effective.
great. phew, just checking. i was like, erm. . .. lots of power, distributed. .. thanks for verifying and allowing me to put that anxiety in check!
Most folks on Gridcoin are pretty altruistic, we tend to have a lot more white hats than black hats :)
well that's good to know. you know what it's like, especially with IOT coming on the scene with cheap crappy boxes from china, the last thing we need is a portal for the script kiddies to jump on. i'm glad we have more gandalfs these days on these blockchain platforms. ..
Yeah IoT security is a cluster waiting to happen, if you are interested I know some guys who are working on it https://www.chainofthings.com/
thanks. i'll certainly check it out.
It already has happened.
So how powerful CPU/GPU you need for this to actually help gridcoin and not slow it down?
That is a very good question!
There are 2 parts to the answer, one part about BOINC and the other part about the Gridcoin client.
The science work runs on a platform called BOINC, the BOINC manager that gives you control over that is extremely lightweight, it runs on my Android phone and on a Raspberry Pi with hardly any resource usage at all. The science work that you are processing, the tasks or as we call them the Work Units, can use upto 100% of the rest of your devices available CPU, unless you set a lower limit. Each task or Work Unit has a deadline by which it must be returned completed, most projects allow quite generous timescales, so you do not need to run 24 hours on high power equipment to complete them in time.
Gridcoin is a separate application, it too uses very little CPU time and again it does not need to run 24 hours, you could run it just once a week for a day to catch your rewards. On my Raspberry Pi 3 Gridcoin uses about 30% of one CPU core, on my big PC it uses about 3%.
So you can see from that, you can use very low power/old equipment and all it does is add to Gridcoin and the scientific work being done. I personally have not heard of anyone being unable to run it.
Very cool indeed
We're growing rapidly and these stats don't lie 😍
We've seen some nice increase in activity on all fronts within the community, feels pretty good if I say so.
Yeah I feel our faith in BOINC and the Gridcoin platform is being rewarded now, lets hope it continues to grow. Even if it doesnt, Im not going anywhere, and I doubt you are either.
I have a wallet with a few hundred Gridcoins I obtained in early 2014 and when I finally was able to get back into crypto, I realized they were no longer valid. That made me so sad, specially seeing as it looks to be a great project. Godspeed to you, gentlemen!
Sorry to hear that.
We had a not of orphan GRC(old) and kept the old chain moving extra long (more then half a year after Gridcoin Research started). But a lot of people had just forgot it or came back way too late, like you.
Indeed! As I said, it was my fault and nobody else's. Is there something I can do for this? Maybe donate my old wallet to charity?
I dont think it has any value at all, sorry. But look Im in a good mood today, setup a new wallet, post your address and I will send you 100 GRC.
Hopefully you will stay and mine with us.
That's very cool of you: S4XS4pih2yiRfmECoKvYw89rvTybBJP2pk
Appreciate it!
Done, now tell all your followers you found a dope giving out free GRC ;)
EDIT: Please dont!
No, sorry. Nobody is going to buy it even if you get someone to run the chain again ;)
All unclaimed GRC have been moved into the Gridcoin Foundation, where PR etc. of Gridcoin is paid from.
Oh shucks, sorry to hear. Yeah when the project moved from PoW to PoB they did a coin conversion, its right about the time I joined Gridcoin.
No worries, it was my fault to lose those coins and not anybody else's! Is there a way to find out how many there were in this old wallet of mine? I'd love to find that out.
You might find someone who can help on the official forum https://cryptocurrencytalk.com/forum/464-gridcoin-grc/
I feel like everyone that talks about gridcoin is mining! I feel like a cheater and like I'm. It contributing having just bought a decent amount of it!!
I think being a long term investor is OK, you arent cheating, especially if you are helping get the message out, which I think you are.
If you can, come and mine with us, it will take a little investment in time and some patience, but you will have the warm fuzzy feeling of doing something nice for humanity.
Even if research mining isnt feasible, if you put your coins in the core wallet and let it stake, you will get 1.5% interest, thats helping to secure the network.