RE: Investigating the Pomegranate Network Mining Gridcoin
Even if everything is above board, your business model appears to be predatary and entirely in bad taste.
You get people to install your client with either promises that they are helping charity and could win some money or by the dubious (even when legal) method of bundling it with other software. You then take all of the money earned and give some back to charity and some back to the users.
What your users don't seem to realise is that both they and the charities would be far better off if they ran Boinc themselves and donated half of their earnings to charity. The only people making money from this is yourselves by preying on people who are not informed or are not very computer literate.
Personally my opinion is that you are morally wrong (boarderline legally wrong) in your blatently over-exagerated claims.
- The 33-33-33 split does not add up.
- Elsewhere you state half your profits go to charities which doesn't tie up with the above.
- You claim partnerships with several major charities yet they do not list you as a partner on their websites.
- You claim to have 550,000+ PC's always available and 1million on request yet boinc only has 820,479 computers running in total.
I have no doubt you do give some money to charity and give some back to users, but how your business operates is extremely unethical and distasteful even if you can argue it's just about legal.
How do you think we pay our staff, in candy floss? Share of profits and revenue are not the same thing. This is very basic stuff.
As the prize fund is technically a business expense, not profit, it means the remaining 33-33 is the same as saying 50-50. So yes, we give half the profit to charity. More, in fact. Way more, if you count the value of the computing we donate to science too.
It is illegal under UK law to even mention the charities on our site without written permission from each one. Not amazed that you didn't know this.
We now administer more machines than the rest of BOINC combined, correct. And yes, we can easily ramp up to 1m+ by increasing our marketing spend. I'd call that a massive success, especially given that without us the BOINC user base would still be constantly shrinking, and the BOINC project itself might not even exist by now.
Nothing you claim is unethical, actually is. You've assumed and accused without basic fact checking, just like the OP. Not on.
"How do you think we pay our staff" you constitute an arbitrary layer of friction and we are arguing against your existence. Ideally your "staff" does not get paid and people do what they want with their own earnings. Your organization seems like the text-book example of centralized entity gone rouge. You are the reason why people created blockchains and trustless protocols.
Your business model is dead, all we need to do is come together, say some words in memory and bury it!
PS: As for the claim that BOINC would not exist if it weren't for you: props to you for making me giggle :)
I said might, not would, but glad it made you giggle anyway. BOINC was indeed at risk because its funding was to be cut off for at least six months, and we stepped in and covered it. Please go and check.
GRC is not our business model btw, it's just an extra that uses some of our surplus. Our company predates GRC by many years, and finding staff who can live without wages was never really an option.
PS. We only permit the use of rouge at cabaret nights. Company policy.
So you twist and turn again to justify yourself. Your aggressive manner is not that of a professional and does nothing to pursuade me that you are anything but the grubby company I have come to consider you.
Doing some creative accounting to ensure that the lions share of revenue is not counted as profit is pretty low and only backs up my position that both your users and the charities would be much better off without you as middle man.
I also highly doubt your claims that you are bigger than Boinc and the saviours of Boinc.
Everything I've said is true and can be easily fact-checked. How could I make up that we donated $60k to BOINC? It's on public record! You want evidence of how big our grid is (or was, it's bigger now)? Here: http://www.ipd.uw.edu/news-pages/the-power-of-charity-for-protein-design/
Doubts are fine, presumption of guilt is not. I apologise for getting annoyed, this is the first time I've been called a criminal by people who literally know nothing about me and it is a very unpleasant experience.
PS. Nobody would be better off without us. We are harnessing an otherwise entirely-wasted resource. There is no middleman.