Now, with Gridcoin, your adding a financial incentive to cheat to the mix and want to change the whole credit paradigm to solve that for one specific groups advantage.

I say eliminate Gridcoin from boinc. That removes the financial incentive to cheat which will only make the problem worse. At the very least eliminate paying for crunch with bitcoin in any way.

Cheating was already present due to inner/inter team competition, do you also propose to ban charityengine and any team that offers prizes for BOINC computation?

Improving the credit system does not solve issues that only affect a single group - cheating affects all BOINC users/teams. If a new credit system was devised, it wouldn't be forced upon all projects - projects can chose what credit system to implement (there is no centralized control over BOINC projects), and several may not upgrade simply due to project inactivity or may be unwilling to upgrade due to perceiving it as unnecessary server maintenance.

Due to a lack of centralized power, you cannot eliminate Gridcoin from BOINC. You could campaign for each BOINC project admin to ban/delete team 'Gridcoin', but it's highly unlikely that many project owners will intentionally drive computing power away from their projects just to entertain a single troll.

This is how Gridcoin has grown to be the largest boinc team is by greed.
and yeah I am a member on the Gridcoin site and have seen how the creaters of gridcoin have the full intent to take over boinc and use it to their own ends.
First by becoming the dominant team in Bionc, and them monetizing boinc.

Your misinformation is based on a single cherry-picked forum post; I've already covered this topic: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=10794&postid=68948 (Note that the current poll shows a majority of users wish to vote on the mandatory team requirement)

If BOINC was to transition to a 4th gen credit system or if we can work out how to eliminate cheating, the team requirement removal would only be a matter of managing a scalable solution on the blockchain (increasing neural network registration from 2k to 100k+) instead of for providing security from cheaters. Thusly, Gridcoin would no longer be a one team crypto, but rather a crypto for the entire BOINC community.

And lets not forget the profit in bitcoins of any type are based upon value/demand. More demand higher value. By completely monetizing Boinc, they create huge demand for their currency thereby increasing the value of the bitcoin they already hold. sure they pay a few sheckles out to the crunchers but that is far far far less than the value/demand they are creating. Which makes the gridcoin creators even more wealthy.
[...]
Greed has driven Gridcoin to the great recruiting levels they have attained. greed is driving this initiative to adjust credit. and the only ones that benefit is the founders of gridcoin.

I hold no Bitcoin; it is only used as a trading pair on exchanges - bitcoin is not utilised at all within the gridcoin system.

I don't think wishing to offset some of the electricity costs racked up by BOINC computation is greedy, and the founders of gridcoin are not the only ones to benefit from it continuing to exist (There's no supply cap, in 10+ years the current supply will be a minority compared to the sum of newly generated coins. Not to mention the fact that there was no instant/pre-mine; all existing GRC represents past BOINC computation).

So answer me a question?

WHY would Boinc want to get involved directly with making a few people wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice when the original intent was to volunteer for science?

BOINC is not involved in neither Gridcoin's development nor community (as far as I'm aware, there may be several anon BOINC devs in our community).

The BOINC platform/software is not dedicated solely to science, nor is it mandatory that projects must have a scientific purpose; there are several non-scientific BOINC projects currently - do you oppose their existence too?

Regarding people becoming wealthy 'beyond the dreams of avarice', thats rather far fetched considering Gridcoin currently is worth (1/4030=0.025%) the value of Bitcoin.

Cheating has been going on since the moment distributing computing was formed. And will continue despite your best efforts to stop it. and that is simply to stay on top of a leaderboard. Much less being paid to be on top of that board.

Are you justifying the existence of cheating purely based on its presence in the past? Your second sentence reads like a threat, are you upset that you or your team members will no longer be able to fraudulently claim a high leaderboard position?

Surely if we can identify solutions to cheating, their implementation would be beneficial to the entire BOINC community? Whilst it may be a cat&mouse game, why should we not oppose cheaters? Do you take the same view on computer security updates (considering it's a similar never-ending cat&mouse game).

I say leave it alone, and eliminate pay for production from boinc. Remove greed as an incentive for crunching.

The scientific community will love ya for it as will most of the organized teams out there.

As I've stated above, censorship/oppression of communities based on their purpose is unlikely to occur.

Please stay on topic of the 4th gen credit system instead of derailing the topic towards gridcoin.

To those reading: Sorry for having to reply to this post (went off topic myself).

When you need to insult/abuse your critics to defend your position from serious criticism.

Usually there is something funny (crooked) going on in the background.

Let me ask a question. if this is so great, why not take the open source boinc platform and devise you own crunching system and leave boinc out of it?

Why the need to take over the platform?

And yes there are programmers what will cheat any system you can devise. I mean Moore's law? you obviously have some smarts.

Windows ring a bell? they have been trying to lock windows down since they first wrote it, but every time they release a new version, the next day a hacked version is available on the undernet. The millions they pay for security and it's hacked before it is even released.

There is no absolutely secure boinc. A pipe dream all your trying to do is get boinc dev to work with you in your money making scheme.

You will lose the boinc community and you will never get them back

More importantly you will lose the reasearchers, as they will take the open source platform and develop their own.

Does any one forget what happened to the medical program when the rumor hit that they were for profit? it took them years to get their reputation and crunchers back.

You guys can be greedy all you want. you can also dupe the community into supporting you.

But just remember, if you really were altruistic and just trying to get the little guy some power deferment, why cite the current value of gridcoin? and it's potential?

You guys are in it for the bucks.

Your whole response and each insult nails that home.

---

Egilman, you are right - fully commercial distributed computing networks are already in development, but not by Gridcoin. Most likely they will be based on Ethereum, whose market value (as we write this) is 500 times bigger than Gridcoin and still growing. So, your worries are indeed justified - people are in it for bucks and tomorrow they will happily switch to the network which pays more. It's just not happening here. You are giving altruism lessons to the wrong people.

These forums are for discussion of anything that goes about BOINC. No discussion is ever set in stone about its direction, so if the direction deviates somewhat to the left or right, fine. Eventually it'll always comes back on topic.

If you do not like what others say in the discussion, or if someone's opinion differs so much from yours, you don't go calling them a troll. If you truly cannot get over what they say, put them on ignore. The option is available in the forum preferences. That way their posts are hidden from your view, you don't have to worry about what they say anymore, and you don't have to go call them names for absolutely no reason.

---

These forums are for discussion of anything that goes about BOINC. No discussion is ever set in stone about its direction, so if the direction deviates somewhat to the left or right, fine. Eventually it'll always comes back on topic.

If you do not like what others say in the discussion, or if someone's opinion differs so much from yours, you don't go calling them a troll. If you truly cannot get over what they say, put them on ignore. The option is available in the forum preferences. That way their posts are hidden from your view, you don't have to worry about what they say anymore, and you don't have to go call them names for absolutely no reason.

Cool, permission to maintain going off topic granted! It's somewhat fair to categorize Egilman's posts as trolling though considering he doesn't acknowledge answers to his questions, but fair enough after this post I'll cease namecalling, it was quite crass of me.

When you need to insult/abuse your critics to defend your position from serious criticism.

Usually there is something funny (crooked) going on in the background.

What insult? Cheekily implying that you're a cheater for defending cheating? Or implying that failing to acknowledge previous answers/responses to your questions/posts (in this thread and the 'monetization' thread) somewhat constitutes trolling?

Let me ask a question. if this is so great, why not take the open source boinc platform and devise you own crunching system and leave boinc out of it?

Why the need to take over the platform?

What specificity are you referring to by 'this'? The general concept of a 4th gen credit system?

According to the BOINC project governance model, decisions are based on community consensus & and disputes are decided upon by the PMC. https://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/ProjectGovernance

Simply put there is no reason to fork BOINC at this point (nor should there be), the concept of a 4th gen credit system has not been defined never-mind there being a community breaking lack of consensus on the matter.

Your opposition to further development/improvement of the credit system has been noted & should be taken into account in the future (to maintain fair community consensus). How community consensus is measured would be an interesting side-topic.

And yes there are programmers what will cheat any system you can devise. I mean Moore's law? you obviously have some smarts.

Windows ring a bell? they have been trying to lock windows down since they first wrote it, but every time they release a new version, the next day a hacked version is available on the undernet. The millions they pay for security and it's hacked before it is even released.

Your analogy of Moore's law to cheating a credit system makes little sense, computers are getting more powerful every year thus BOINC cheating will always occur? Poor analogy.

Windows is one of the most successful brands of operating systems on the market. Of course they have been fighting a continuous battle against vulnerabilities in their operating systems (all popular software is subject to continuous attack). Had Microsoft never patched any of the publicly exposed vulnerabilities their operating systems would not nearly have the same market share they currently hold & Microsoft would likely not be the same company it is today.

Simply because new vulnerabilities/issues may present themselves in the future doesn't mean that existing vulnerabilities/issues (that are public knowledge) should be ignored/maintained. Stagnation is never the solution to security flaws.

There is no absolutely secure boinc. A pipe dream all your trying to do is get boinc dev to work with you in your money making scheme.

You're right that there is no absolutely secure BOINC - there will always exist flaws in software (past/present/future) that will be taken advantage of by malicious actors, but using that as an excuse not to take positive action against their existence doesn't make sense.

What's wrong with interacting with the BOINC community/developers? Do you wish for this to not be an open community? Many of the users that have expressed their views in this thread have zero affiliation with Gridcoin yet share somewhat similar views that a 4th gen credit system could be a good idea (we have yet to reach consensus on it's definition).

You will lose the boinc community and you will never get them back

What makes you say this? At this point, our team/software has yet to reach the majority of the BOINC community.

More importantly you will lose the reasearchers, as they will take the open source platform and develop their own.

I thought that you wished for us to develop our own fork of BOINC, now you wish for researchers themselves to fork their own BOINC platform?

The vast majority of BOINC users don't care about the credit system, only a small percentage do, so I doubt that a mass exodus would occur. If it did, it would be great publicity for BOINC & volunteer computing.

Does any one forget what happened to the medical program when the rumor hit that they were for profit? it took them years to get their reputation and crunchers back.

Got a link to a thread on this? What project was this? Do you oppose any company that runs a BOINC project that isn't expressly non-profit? IBM is a for-profit company yet their WCG project is one of the most popular BOINC projects.

But just remember, if you really were altruistic and just trying to get the little guy some power deferment, why cite the current value of gridcoin? and it's potential?

I cited the value of Gridcoin as a response to your post where you implied that Gridcoin was "making a few people wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice"; Avarice - one of the '7 deadly sins' being incapable of dreaming about a marketcap 0.025% of Bitcoin's marketcap is a bit far fetched.

You guys are in it for the bucks.

Your whole response and each insult nails that home.

My views/posts are that of my own and do not represent the entire Gridcoin community.

Egilman, you are right - fully commercial distributed computing networks are already in development, but not by Gridcoin. Most likely they will be based on Ethereum, whose market value (as we write this) is 500 times bigger than Gridcoin and still growing. So, your worries are indeed justified - people are in it for bucks and tomorrow they will happily switch to the network which pays more. It's just not happening here. You are giving altruism lessons to the wrong people.

Ethereum has a long way to go yet, but looks to be the future of the cloud, computing in general and Microsoft is betting on it.

But Distributed Computing as we know it is probably a decade away before it flips to Ethereum.

And I know I'm talking to a wall. But it get so frustrating to see everything good in the world going down the money rathole.

Gets frustrating. WE hated exposing the cheats in Seti I we were afraid of what it would show on our own team, Thankfully none (except for the proof of concept accounts we set up for verification)

And it was Rosetta that took the hit for the rumor that they were going for profit. (I was working at the UW when it happened)

There is always going to be those that look for the angle. I just wish it wouldn't happen here, Individual contribution to science is dying out to the corporate/government sponsored and financed conglomerate.

One of the last bastions of freedom.

---

You gain some, you lose some. Fully commercial distributed computing networks will certainly be profit-driven, corporate-controlled and non-independent. But they will attract more people to the idea of distributed computing, hopefully providing scientists with more computing power in the long run.

In the end, I think the best idea is to let the users decide if they want to donate their CPU time completely for free (pure BOINC) or to join something like the Golem project and let the Big Company run unknown, proprietary code on their machines, with little or no control over the process, but also getting paid for it. Or join Gridcoin and get a token reward, but also lose some of the BOINC freedoms (cannot join another team, cannot get rewarded for every BOINC project etc). Or join Folding@home and get rewarded in Curecoin or Foldingcoin. Or join Sia and rent your hard-drive for Siacoins. There are endless possibilites and the more powerful machine you have, more options will be available to you. Let the users choose.

I suspect the project scientists who commission the research in the first place will do the choosing. I've suspected for a while that many of them would prefer the more controlled environment of a commercial platform, rather than the Wild West of BOINC with all these message boards to worry about. Witness the way SIMAP was at the forefront of BOINC for Android with their HTC 'Power to Give' collaboration - but very rapidly closed down their entire BOINC operation, soon afterwards.

Well, it's certainly possible BOINC will diminish when fully commercial and more controlled platforms become available. As Egilman said, people are in it for bucks. And scientists too, we might add.

Anyway, in this context, Gridcoin could actually strengthen BOINC. I guess it would be possible to acquire the computational power of the Gridcoin team quite quickly with some Gridcoins and for a scientist with a limited budget that would certainly be more affordable than Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure (which are still quite expensive). It hasn't been done yet, but it's feasible enough, although still clunky and unstraightforward for someone who isn't familiar with cryptocurrencies and/or BOINC. Golem project looks far more advanced on paper, but it's still in early development, while BOINC is here and working.

Paying the research with a cryptocurrency as Gridcoin can only help the BOINC purpose. If a day the value of this cryptocurrency will grow certainly will attract greedy and bad people that are only profit driven, but in any scenario will drive on BOINC projects an huge amount of additional computational power to help science progress in the same way the avarice moved tons of computational power wasted in Bitcoin and others cryptocurrencies mining.
It's a win-win, so make no sense claim such ban, prevent all possible cheating attempts is needed in any case.

I'm not sure if this is a dead discussion or not, so I apologize, but I feel the need to post some input.

I have just discovered BOINC through Gridcoin, and it's a shame I hadn't discovered it earlier, but there are reasons for that. When BOINC was first introduced, I was in middle school. Looking at Google trends, the publicity of BOINC has declined since 2005, and not being a part of the scientific community, I don't know when I would have encountered it. Now that I've discovered it, I think it's one of the greatest things I could contribute to. It's a centralized group of causes that I can get behind. I have a gaming rig and a work computer, and I finally feel like they are living their potential.

And because of Gridcoin, it's not just a win- it's a win-win. It helps me justify my contribution, when I am not really in a position to be donating money or time at this point in my life. The fact is, I hope that the payoff is at least breakeven, but I'm okay with losing money because it aligns with my core beliefs. And the reality is, I'm sure this will be the case with most of the participants on the Gridcoin team. The average person isn't in the position to justify running up their electric bill or taking the time to monitor their computer cycles. Especially if they aren't already scientifically or technically inclined. But that doesn't mean their contribution isn't helpful or needed. And it doesn't mean that they wouldn't be willing or enthusiastic about being a part of the greater BOINC community, if given a minimal incentive.

Egilman, I completely understand your sentiment. You have been doing for a long time here what you are seeing some people come in and do in the hopes of making money. It seems to taint the feeling of community around contributing selflessly to projects that may change the world. I know that there are definitely people with the wrong, and even malevolent intentions that are and will be associated with Gridcoin, and they may not have entered this space without it. But this quote struck me:

Individual contribution to science is dying out to the corporate/government sponsored and financed conglomerate.

I think this is an accurate statement, but even further I don't think the average individual has ever had a chance to meaningfully contribute to a greater scientific effort. Again, most people don't have the time or resources. It's an unfortunate fact that science takes money. This need perverts at every turn: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dr-no-money/

The Gridcoin project especially feels to me like an opportunity to fight against exactly this issue. To me at least, the project's priorities are aligned with BOINC completely. At the very grandest hopes for Gridcoin, one would dream of a currency by science, for science. Individuals creating value through computer cycles, and users like yourself can compound their contributions, by also contributing the earned currency. An incentive system to help galvanize a population around contribution to science, whether you have a room of servers or an android phone.

As you point out, this brings all kinds of negative people to the table, but that is inherent in expanding the scope to the average person. Really, every corner of the scientific community could go a long way by reaching the average person. And the fight to combat the effects of a negative influence is a worthwhile one, because the value is twofold: increase in reach, and improving the product and message.

Which finally brings me back on topic- this credit system does already have value. Though this is the first time I've ever "mined," I have a long history of dealing with virtual points and currencies. If someone is trying to game the system to get more of it, you know it has value. It may only be in exposure or in status, but it's valuable. They are spending time and effort purely to gain these numbers.

Which means that it is worth protecting, if you are going to have it as part of your community. Even a purely ornamental measure is important to the people it influences, if only in the subconscious. Not to mention that anyone who has run any tests or dealt with analytics knows the compounding effects of bad data.

I think the effort to prevent cheating in the BOINC credit system is a worthy one, and happens to align directly with the priority of the Gridcoin project.

I don't have enough technical knowledge to contribute to task verification for granting credits, but if one of the goals of this discussions is creating a system that is comparable cross-project, then why not create a derivative metric off of the standardized cycle-driven credit system? Gridcoin is doing it in one way, but if the goal is pure comparison, there are plenty of options depending on how you want the output to look. You could have a variable logarithmic scale normalized to each project. I just don't think the answer has to be the one true credit. I always see a value in a base standard, with derivatives for comparison.

Just my .02; glad to be a part of the community here.

To anyone interested, the Gridcoin community is holding a Gridcoin Hangout on BeyondBitcoin's mumble server on Saturday 30th. The 4th generation BOINC credit system will be one of the topics discussed, I'd really appreciate it if BOINC community members could attend. Cheers :)

https://steemit.com/beyondbitcoin/@cm-steem/gridcoin-hangout-001-rsvp-and-suggest-topics

I couldn't make it to the Hangout. Are there some minutes from the discussion?

I couldn't make it to the Hangout. Are there some minutes from the discussion?

The hangout has been uploaded to soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/gridcoin-community-hangouts/gridcoin-hangout-001

The 4th gen BOINC credit system was the first topic of discussion (First 20 mins), basically summing up the topic for our community.

Here's a list of topics discussed: https://steemit.com/gridcoin/@erkan/topic-voting-for-gridcoin-hangout-001#@erkan/re-erkan-topic-voting-for-gridcoin-hangout-001-20160729t114852991z

The highest voted topics were prioritised in the hangout, so that's a guide to what was discussed.

I'll schedule another hangout and keep you noted.

Edit: A second hangout has now been scheduled: https://steemit.com/gridcoin/@cm-steem/gridcoin-hangout-002-rsvp-and-suggest-topics

Posted a link to this thread to the boinc_dev mailinglist & several developers have begun discussing this topic:
http://lists.ssl.berkeley.edu/pipermail/boinc_dev/2016-August/022235.html

Just giving this thread a bump up, so it can stay open and I don't have to reopen it again tomorrow.

*bump*

Has anyone had any further thoughts regarding a possible 4th gen credit system?

We've discussed it a bit in the Gridcoin community hangouts.

*bump* This topic came up in the 18th GRC hangout on the 3rd of Dec in a discussion between the Gridcoin & Curecoin/Foldingcoin communities.

https://steemit.com/gridcoin/@cm-steem/gridcoin-community-hangout-018-03th-dec-2016-9pm-gmt-rsvp-and-suggest-topics#@peppernrino/re-cm-steem-gridcoin-community-hangout-018-03th-dec-2016-9pm-gmt-rsvp-and-suggest-topics-20161128t000908864z

Do we want to be fair to participants and projects alike by promoting credit parity between projects? If so we need a standard which all projects could adhere to in calculating their credit schemes.

Is there some reason that monetary value has not been discussed as a basis for Credit 4? Or maybe it has and I didn't see it.

Monetary value, after all, is the obvious common denominator among all the various non-cryptocurrency projects' service requirements, and the cryptocurrency projects also.

Why not use the fair market value, in US dollars probably, of the diverse processing, storage, bandwidth, etc, donations of the non-cryptocurrency projects' participants, calculated the same way that professional providers use to bill their customers, as a base for crediting them in a fair and equal way?

Cryptocurrency donation projects would need only to base their credits on actual donated dollars, or whatever currency the donation is made in converted into dollars.

Although this idea might shake things up a bit and take away some of the freedom that projects currently have in making up their own credit regimes, it does seems as though that freedom is being rather liberally interpreted by certain projects.

Projects would still be free to award bonus credits for things like fast completion of time-sensitive work units like GPUGrid's or successful completion of very long and fragile work units such as Climate Prediction's coupled models.

Maybe we could even found a 501c organization through which receipts could be issued to crunchers for tax deduction purposes.

Monetrising the credits system would be fraught with many problems, not the least of which are not all participants are US taxpayers, and not all projects are based in the USA.

A credit system that fitted every project, and gave a "level playing field" across both projects and hardware would be a great thing. The trouble is that some projects are "determined" to give very high credits for their work, with no regard to the hardware being used, while others "play by the rules" and attempt to grant credit in line with the "real" work done, and I doubt that you will ever convince either group to significantly change course (more's the pity - I would love to see the level playing field.)