Synopsis of discussion on Proposals and Preliminary Polls

(Please note that, at the end of this post, there is important information regarding polls created in relation to any of these proposals.)

Overall the discussion regarding the Gridcoin Research 4.0 proposal post (a highly recommended, technical read) on Saturday the 4th of November 2017 was a huge success!

Purpose of the Proposal

This article was written by @barton26, @caraka, The Earl of Annandale, @jringo, quezacoatl, @skcin, and @tomasbrod to condense down conversations that have been going on for months. The purpose of which is to bring theory to production.

These proposals are to spur on actionable discussion within the community. This article does not explain these proposals in detail – for that you will need to look to the article linked in the opening sentence of this post. Please note that these topics are still being debated and considered; input is still readily welcomed. Everything below is a summary of the discussion that took place on the Gridcoin channel kindly hosted on the BeyondBitcoin Mumble server.

The Discussion

The conversation began by detailing the relative roles of the authors of the Proposal Article within Gridcoin. @barton26, @caraka, quezacoatl, @skcin and @tomasbrod are all Gridcoin developers while The Earl of Annandale and @jringo helped with technical writing.

Following this the discussion moved directly into some concerns raised by @cm-steem, also called “CM” in this post, in the comments of the Proposal Article.

DoS and Manual Rewards

Firstly he brings up the possibility of a Denial-of-Service attack through the repeated use of the proposed Manual Reward. The Manual Reward is one of the options in changing the way people receive their reward for crunching BOINC tasks. A denial-of-service attack is when a computer receives too many requests per second for information and cannot cope. This could be caused by the Manual Reward button if it is spam clicked. This is a known issue with Manual Reward. A combination of both a fee being charged for every reward transaction and a time limit being set between rewards is possible. Unfortunately multiple accounts can be created to attack the network and circumvent any time limitation. The idea of a transaction fee, on the other hand, has been implemented and proven through general blockchain technologies.

Purpose of Fees

This lead the discussion to the purpose of fees and how they can be extremely beneficial for the Gridcoin economy. Fees can be used for multiple purposes including:

being distributed to stakers, The GRC Foundation, BOINC projects - to subsidize server costs and security, charities, relief efforts, causes and crowd-sourcing, or fees could be burned to help combat inflation.

Manual Rewards and Holding coins

When returning to the topic of the Manual Reward it was also noted that it could cause economic problems as there would be no incentive from the Gridcoin network for users to hold the coins.

Concerns about Beacon Mint

@cm-steem’s next point was regarding “Beacon Mint”, a system where the user attempts to stake a block via their staking balance or (separately) through building up reward for research owed over time. CM points out that it sounds apprehensively close to an old system of staking that had a security flaw. In the discussion though, @tomasbrod was assuring that Beacon Mint was designed to fix these flaws that were in the staking system prior to V8 (V8 is the new, entirely Proof of Stake system that was implemented to patch these security flaws). Nevertheless, developers would seriously inspect this system before implementation. Throughout the discussion Beacon Mint was generally a popular proposal among those in attendance.

Speed of the Polls

@Jringo highlighted the need for speedy development in response to CM’s third concern: that the time frame put forward for polling the proposals is an insufficient period of time for substantial development polls. Poll requirements were determined based on recent popular polls such as the rebranding effort and the developer compensation poll.

If we are going to have a roadmap for 2018, we need to complete this production project by 2018. These polls are essentially 3 weeks of pre poll discussion and 3 weeks of post poll discussion. That is 6 weeks of discussion. - @jringo

Superblock Payment Problems

There was general agreement with @cm-steem’s reservations about Superblock Payments requiring greater compute time. It was also noted that it does not scale well over time. These issues may lead to Superblock Payments losing popularity to the other payment solutions unless these problems can be solved or clarity can be brought if it is currently being misunderstood.

Why change for non-investors?

CM’s next issue, regarding new users and their chance of staking, caused quite a stir. His basic premise was why change the system for those who won’t invest? The response to this was that it would make more sense to encourage overall growth rather than forced investment in Gridcoin. Change is imperative – not just for the sake of Gridcoin but also for the growth of science. Users without money to invest should still be rewarded for their work. Previous solutions such as the Noob Block didn’t work as intended due to calculation issues and could be exploited.

The Earl Block

@Jringo used this opportunity to point out that staking solutions like Beacon Mint would eventually become insufficient to reward new users and users with extremely low BOINC stats, such as those crunching on mobile devices. This is because large investors and serious crunchers would be taking up the majority of the block stake frequency. Those who are not capable of building significant stake weight through crunching or balance may never receive their earned rewards as their probability of staking would be relatively infinitesimal. @GeeBell proposed a solution in having monthly Small Reward Superblocks, dubbed Earl-Blocks in chat, that would pay out the unclaimed rewards since the last Small Reward Superblock that still have little chance of staking through Beacon Mint. The difference between this and Superblock Payments is that only the subset of users who have not been rewarded and have little chance of being rewarded in the future will receive their small reward. This drastically decreases the data handled compared to Superblock Payments.

Sharedropping

General agreement was voiced regarding CM’s opinion that it would be best to secure historical private data of some users that is still somewhat accessible. This would be done by moving to a new blockchain in a process called “Sharedropping”. Implementing Sharedropping will also have the advantage of improving the underlying blockchain technology of Gridcoin. While agreement was had regarding this, there were some divisive opinions regarding the type of chain that would be moved to with some members supporting a move to a graphene like chain whilst others strongly opposed it. More clarification regarding the pros and cons of such a chain would be needed for the community to form a more unified opinion.

That concluded the discussion in terms of @cm-steem’s comments on the Proposal Article. While he could not make it to the discussion his input was extremely helpful in facilitating the conversation.

Total Credit Delta - a Fantastic Simple Solution

Conversation also covered the proposed move to Total Credit Delta - a simple system to calculate a user’s reward for work done that replaces the current convoluted calculation based on RAC. Overall there was an immensely positive response to the idea of the Total Credit Delta. Questions were asked about “bunkering” – the process of storing many tasks of a single BOINC project so that if the tasks are depleted a user can continue crunching them earning a disproportionate reward. It was postulated that it will be possible to take into account whether or not a project has run out of tasks when doing the Total Credit Delta calculation. The proposed Greylist would help control this too.The Greylist would help ease other concerns raised over abusing BOINC to gain advantages in Gridcoin.

Pointless Speculation

Speculation was brought up about investors possibly not liking Constant Block Rewards, or CBR, in which there is a set reward for staking a block instead of the interest pay out that currently occurs. The response to this was that there should be little reason for investors to have a problem with it as they would still earn rewards while simultaneously furthering the security of their investment. Finally even if for some reason it causes investors to sell, if the system is stable, then Gridcoin should grow over time despite any dip.

A Variable for a Constant

CBR may eventually not be able to service the interest of holders and so a question was asked about a variable being used instead of a constant for reward in CBR. This variable would change over time as the Gridcoin network needed to pay out more rewards earned for staking per day. However, if this ever needed to be the case then the constant could also be changed manually. Further investigation is needed into the viability of this suggestion.

Dynamic Witness Participation

Regarding the creation of Superblocks it was pointed out that people could set up multiple nodes in an effort to win the dynamic selection of the proposed Dynamic Witness Participation in creating Superblocks. This is not seen as an problem though.

Fixing CPID Issues

Issues in connecting Gridcoin to the user’s BOINC account can be fixed through proposals CM-SSA or, alternatively, BrodSSA – see Proposal Article for further details. Unless BOINC project managers and developers actively cooperate, it was agreed that BrodSSA seems to be the more viable of the two options. However, following the discussion @cm-steemit has clarified how CM-SSA would work as well as responded to some of the concerns. These details can be found here. Both of these processes will require manual user interaction with BOINC and the Gridcoin client during setup. Could this process be automated for the user in the future? For now there was consensus that fixing the issues are of more importance than ease of access.

Although much more was discussed in between these main points, this will conclude the summary of the conversation. Special thanks to @caraka, Coltwlf, Fkinglag0, @geebell, @ifoggz, @jringo, Langfod, @m3rcos1ty, @pathforger, @peppernrino, Sixophrenia, The Earl of Annandale, @tomasbrod, @zipity all of whom joined the conversation on Mumble!

To join the conversation

Upcoming Gridcoin Community Hangout #43 will be on Saturday, November 11 @ 7PM UTC check everytimezone for timezone info. Follow the link to Hangout #43 if you would like to comment to reserve a topic for discussion.

Label: BeyondBitcoin - Gridcoin
Address: mumble.grcnode.co.uk or mumble.beyondboinc.net (IP = 149.210.187.155)
Port: 64738
Username: Enter your username, try to pick one people will recognize you by - i.e. your IRC username
Password: w0rldCh@NG3rsUN!t3

Have your say online

Gridcoin forum on CryptoCurrencyTalk
Gridcoin Discord
Or request an email invite to the Gridcoin Slack Channel

Important information regarding the creation of polls:

For these proposals, a valid poll is one which is verifiably created by one of the individuals involved with compiling the Gridcoin Research 4.0 proposal post. Furthermore, only polls which reach at least 15% of the available vote share by their closing will be valid. All valid polls will be used to inform the Gridcoin 4.0 Roadmap for 2018.

Before closing off, special thanks to @jringo for taking the time to proofread this article.

Here’s to the Growth of Gridcoin!

Signed
@GeeBell