News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volunteer computing. Parent comment

Re:Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volu... by hakesdev on Tuesday February 23, 2021 @09:35AM (#26237700)
If you use a money with an issuance scheme that doesn't derive from pure costs (useless things like hashing), the underlying incentives of that money will seed its own destruction.

What happens if you have a coin based on "useful work" and you "solve" the problem you were hoping to solve. Now a lot of "miners" leave the network, presumably because they were only there to help solve that particular problem. Now you have a weak system, and a system subject to 51% attacks by adversarial miners, and therefore not a good money/coin.

I don't see how HN commenters (in large part) don't get this. It's the Single-responsibility Principle, just in a different context.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volu... by Forbo on Tuesday February 23, 2021 @09:39AM (#26237773)
Considering the number of supercomputers that have been constructed since the days of ENIAC, I don't think we'll be running out of scientific computing problems any time soon. And if we somehow do manage to run out of computing problems, then I guess we've already succeeded.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volu... by fsflover on Tuesday February 23, 2021 @09:53AM (#26237951)
But can you change the task underlying your cryptocurrency without breaking the network?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volu... by ilammy on Tuesday February 23, 2021 @10:08AM (#26238112)
If the network has been designed for this in the first place – why shouldn't you be able to?

With Gridcoin you can participate in a number of eligible BOINC projects [1] and get rewards for computing on any of them. The network can add or remove projects.

[1]: https://gridcoin.ddns.net/pages/project-list.php

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volu... by zekrioca on Tuesday February 23, 2021 @01:52PM (#26241193)
I'm wondering why you think supercomputers are actually built for. Besides that, the type of computational problems that are submitted to and that BOINC helps solving are different to those that a supercomputer solves. The former (known as High Throughput Computing, HTC) is concerned mainly -- as the name suggests -- with throughput, while the latter (High Performance Computing, HPC) with speed/latency.

There is a reason why Cloud providers do not yet have "real" HPC offerings (i.e., performance-wise), even though with all the marketing they do to appear otherwise..

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Gridcoin: An open-source cryptocurrency that rewards volu... by Forbo on Tuesday February 23, 2021 @06:46PM (#26244641)
Sorry I didn't specify. There's still plenty of demand for HTC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_...

[ Parent | on HN ]