RE: The Gridcoin Fireside #6 - Gridcoin 4.0.3.0: The Scraper. This one is kind of a big deal.
For many people, myself included, downtime is not a fear. Collusion is the fear. As you state in the recording, this is blockchain. The rule is "trust no node". So if we must trust for now, which we must, trusting 5 people is incredibly scary, but understandable for a boot-strap. Trusting 10-15 is absolute minimum in my eyes. Trusting 25 would be good. Down the road, as the tech develops, trusting even more would be best.
I would not worry about BOINC server load if we build an ecosystem that encourages BOINC development.
I would not worry about credentials if we encourage or incentivize entities to seek scraper status.
Additionally, the more entities that put reputation at risk by hosting scraping nodes, the fewer scraper nodes are needed to establish reliability. A university department is less likely to collude and risk damaging its reputation than an individual. This also depends on how blockchain law evolves.
This is one of these things we have to be thinking decades ahead on or we'll be building a system that can easily be replaced by one that is better.
Hmm... You are not trusting 5 people. The algorithm is built to cross-verify. Collusion is the real issue. Starting with the position that the scrapers are independent, it requires a bad actor to gain direct control of 60% of the number of scrapers, and publish stats in such a way to achieve convergence (i.e. matching to hash and signature). Because of hashed and signed nature of the messages, man in the middle attacks will not work. (Because the man in the middle does NOT have the private key to sign the messages properly.)
The sole issue here is the probability of non-independence of the nodes. Certainly the chance of "collusion" is higher with a low number of nodes, but getting beyond even 10 or 15, the chances of collusion between 60% of the nodes is exceedingly small.
We need to publish a list of the scraper nodes to show people that they are truly independent.
Sorry for necro-post, but collusion is about trust! haha I hear what you're saying. With 5 scraper nodes we are trusting that those 5... actually just 3 of them... will not collude.
I understand the need for security-through-privacy etc. etc. The boot-strap as is is fine. Looking forward to building it out!