RE: The Eternal Conflict Between Altruistic Science and The Bottom Line - Gridcoin and BOINC
That is one of the problems with the current reward system in Gridcoin.
It takes research away from popular projects like mapping cancer markers to things less important. Although, I would argue that taking research away from SETI (searching for aliens) is a good thing, but only if it goes to something more important.
The same thing happened to me but now I have switched all my hosts back to WCG (mapping cancer markers) and stopped chasing profit.
IMO we need to look at changing the reward system so that Gridcoin does not influence what projects people crunch.
I'm not sure if that is possible though.
If not, maybe we can use the voting system to vote on a % reward allocation for each project so that the monetary incentive forces people onto the most useful projects.
If someone came up with a reliable and fair system to payout gridcoin for BOINC work independent of the projects you choose, that would be great. But I doubt that this is possible with the current BOINC reward system.
Actually, I don't think the current reward system is bad. Who are we to decide which scientific research is more important and by which percentage. What if seti@home really discovers something? Then everyone who said this is nonsense would be proven wrong. I beliefe BOINC is attractive for projects with low funding and enables scientists to research in fields with low interest by large investors. It would be way easier to run your calculations on a huge compute cluster if you had the money.
So if we made the distribution of rewards scewed towards WCG for example and everyone thinks that curing cancer is more important than everything else, the other projects would not get their computations done. In the case of WCG you could also argue that they have an advantage over smaller projects because they are supported by a huge company (IBM).
But you can still make your own choices. Take @dutch as an example. He has figured out that he has other motivations than money to choose a project. (ethics, advertising his research lab, the pride beeing in a specific journal)
As I see it, if you move away from the projects you like for the money, it is your decision and you have to live with it. There will be people like @dutch that come to the conclusion that money is not everything and support what they think matters. But people have different opinions and preferences, we should not determine which project is important and which is not. We don't know that and we cannot be objective about that.
And the people that are switching projects for the money also help smaller and less popular projects to get their research done. And that is also very important.