The Eternal Conflict Between Altruistic Science and The Bottom Line - Gridcoin and BOINC
I used to contribute to scientific research - for free - through BOINC for years. For the uninitiated, BOINC is a distributed research platform initially conceived to help distribute work for SETI@Home to the computers of volunteers. The computers of the volunteers would analyse the astro-array recordings provided for alien signals, and return the analysis to the project server. However, the platform proved so fit for purpose that many other projects have adopted it as well. It now enables research from pure mathematics (such as finding primes) to biomedicine (mapping cancer markers) and astrophysics (mapping the Milky Way).
One day, somewhere in late May, I stumbled upon Gridcoin. Gridcoin is a cryptocurrency that is 'minted' by researchers doing research through the BOINC platform. This was my first proper interaction with cryptocurrency, as while I was aware of the existence of BTC, I never appreciated the value of crypto. Even so, when I met Gridcoin I was hooked!
The thing with Gridcoin is that your daily mint is relative to your contribution to each research project, in relation to everyone else. That is to say that you earn the most GRC by doing work for the least popular projects. In my BOINC days this was of no concern, as I computed whatever I thought was the coolest or had the most value. After Gridcoin came onto the field, I slowly started to move hosts to focus on different research. Cancer research was dropped and replaced with finding primes. Protein folding was replaced with decoding Enigma messages from WWII. Before I knew it, about a month into my Gridcoin journey, all my compute power was allocated to min/max my daily mint.
Now, before we continue, projects like finding primes and decoding the Enigma messages are not without value. They are just more catered towards very specific applications or interest groups. On the other hand, research into disease and medicine has a far greater impact on society as a whole.
Now, 3 months to the day since I joined Team Gridcoin, I have started to reverse the process. Just yesterday I moved my 13 most powerful workstations to Einstein@Home to scan the universe for gravitational waves and pulsars. Did you know that if you find one of those, you get published in the Astrophysical Journal (have a look here and scroll to page 19)? Those 50,000 GRC I have mined are cool, but they are not nearly as cool as getting published in a journal that prestigious, which normally takes years of work and costs thousands of dollars.
To be perfectly honest, this most recent shift was partly brought on by the top research volunteer at Einstein@Home, and I would like to share part of his motivation with you:
To me, it is quite important to support those who have a chance of making the discoveries that just might really allow us to understand this enigmatic universe we find ourselves in. It is too depressing a thought to imagine we are marooned on this speck of dust we call home without a practical means of ever realistically being able to escape from our solar system. We should be able to colonise other planets or moons but to even just visit a nearby star system seems impossible, let alone the rest of the galaxy. So I've chosen to support projects which might increase our knowledge and understanding of the universe. The hope is that some of these endeavours may help to discover new physics and with that, new possibilities for eventually exploring the cosmos.
The shift has been further motivated by longtime Gridcoin supporter @Vortac. Where I considered project selection an endless tug of war between ethics and money, he managed to put a much brighter spin on it:
Think of the poor POW miners - they are robbed of all this choice and always forced to crunch the same meaningless stuff.
Over the course of the next month I will continue to move my hosts to Einstein and return some to World Community Grid. Sure, this will drastically drop my daily mint, but at least I am making contributions that have a large impact on society. I would rather tell my kids that I did my part to help cure cancer, or explore the cosmos, than that I whacked out a few thousand more dollars. Besides, getting mentioned in the Astrophysical Journal should see the grant money flow in for my own research lab!
Whether you are part of the Gridcoin family or an external observer, I'd love to hear what you think!
Content Credit:
Musée Rodin, Overcup Press
There are also specific events where one gets the chance to get into a research paper, e.g. from the past
So, one could switch temporarily to those, as they happen.
Damn - I did not know that. That's incredibly cool.
Any idea when the next one of these events will come around?
It happens irregularly, and e.g. in Cosmology's case it was, I think a spontaneous thing.
Another BOINC project that seems inclined is Universe@home, see pic:
At least I use them as model when I asked the BOINC admins in the interviews
I don't have the computer power to do much, but I hold Gridcoin because of what is represents. Profit is secondary.
Thank you for your support!
Besides, GRC has a looot of room for market cap growth. A sound investment as far as I am concerned.
Discovery Certificates await :)
https://einsteinathome.org/content/einsteinhome-discovery-certificates
I am oh so very jealous!
Nice post Dutch. After years of mostly altruistic boincing I'd like to step up GRC output a little. I only have 12000 or so, my mag is between 10 and 15 and I have three lame machines doing boincing. I guess I am wondering if you have any advice on how I can tweak it up a bit? I have been doing cosmology, asteroids and milkyway mainly but am interested doing any useful stuff but bumping my return a little while considering V8 changes and what it might mean. Any advice or a pointer to a more appropriate place to ask such a thing?
The best place to talk about that would probably be the #crunch-tinkering channel on the Gridcoin Slack channel. It is a channel where we discuss hardware and project choices to min/max daily research output and GRC yield. It also plays host to build projects of some very cool research rigs.
You can definitely increase the output of your machines! The first thing to do is make sure each has a GPU project and a CPU project, and making sure that you do no CPU-only work for the GPU project, as CPUs cannot compete.
For the CPU project, something like TN-Grid is good as it has low competition at the moment. For your GPU, you say you are running Milkyway. Unless you have a GPU from a very specific set of families that have excellent double precision performance, you will earn almost nothing there. The best GPU project right now for any card that does not excel at double precision is Enigma@Home.
Im just switching my GPU back from Amicable Numbers to GPUGRID, so I get your point.
I'm not a huge miner like you @dutch so the opportunity cost for me is no-where near as pronounced, and over time I tend to flip-flop around projects.
It's important to keep the science close to your heart, like me you are are long time BOINCer and the money is a fringe benefit, but hopefully some of those attracted by the money have caught the BOINC bug as well; that is one of the core missions of Gridcoin.
Very nice conclusion :) I totally get what you are saying.
Step one for me seems to be having enough GRC to go solo. Otherwise all my research does not have my name on it, which is kind of the only thing that bothers me with the pool :D
That is a very good point. I wonder what happens if the pool makes a significant discovery...
I have the same feeling and I notice a lot of us at gridcoin do. I actually think there is something gridcoin as a community could do to focus on work it thinks is more important without focussing on one project or another. The voting system allows for adding/removing a project. Maybe the grc distribution across projects could be something that is not linear but decided by the community. There are downsides however that the big voters can direct gridcoin to certain projects which their HW favours. They could then make earn even more. But maybe a within limits.
I recently got into Gridcoin because i was interested in cryptocurrency but i didn't feel comfortable wasting power on random number crunching for a few cents when i knew there were much older projects like SETI, Folding and Rosetta out there.
It's nice to see it's not all about the coins.
It definitely isn't, which is nice. Team Gridcoin is actually the biggest contributor to Einstein@Home, which is the project looking for pulsars and gravitational waves. It is probably the least profitable whitelisted project to do research for, yet a very large subset of the community contributes to it.
Collectively, we have over 30 million RAC on that project.
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.
It is really nicely written. I was paticipating in distributed computing project with 386 computers already far before BOINC, and when BOINC came I might have been the first to give it a try. After more and more projects coming up Iwas always picking ones that stood closer to me and then just last week I came across GridCoin and I knew it is time to collect some of it for myself. So I set some power behind it. It was fun to see that I had my first few GRC in my wallet after just two days. Then I started to improve my choices and now I'm making more than double each day compared to when I started. And here comes the twist in life, I wanted to see if I could buy some GRC on other cryptos I have, so I headed to some exchaneg sites and what did I find there? I had some GRC, but not enough to transfer... life is funny.
I'll keep on running BOINC with best possible results till I have at least a 1000 GRC in my wallet then I'll move back to my original projects independent on hw much they will get me.
Welcome to the family! Let anyone on here, the Slack chat, IRC, etc know if you have any questions or need any help. It can be daunting to get started with Gridcoin at times.