I was also curious about the pomegranate cpid, did some searching, and ran across this thread. Timely.

I'll chip in my .02 speaking as only a mid-level "miner", although it's hard to think of BOINC as mining. From all the discussion points on both sides it seems like this is a pretty grey area.

I agree with zamaza in that I think this is actually a gridcoin problem. The incentive for this sort of behavior will only increase as the value of gridcoin increases, making it ever more difficult for regular folk to receive rewards for their compute work in any meaningful way. From the numbers on gridcoinstats.eu, the two pomegranate cpid's are currently collecting a total of ~4430 GRC / day. My understanding is there are ~48,000 GRC rewarded / day, and there are 26 projects receiving cuts of that, which would mean the pomegranate net is currently consuming over 2 entire projects worth of GRC rewards / day. About 2.4 projects worth, to be more specific.

Think about when the value of GRC rises further (it doubled in just the last month or so) - more large operators will likely decide to get in. A bare handful of people controlling networks or warehouses full of machines could easily consume most of the GRC produced per day. Is this a good thing? I tend to think no. It's more compute power for the research, but wouldn't this discourage participation from the wider community of compute volunteers over time? Isn't that wider participation sort of the original point of gridcoin? I get that competition is a good thing to drive productivity and expand compute capability, but unchecked dominance of any market eventually turns into monopoly.