Posts by Vortac

1) Message boards : Questions and problems : [Discussion] 4th Generation BOINC credit system (Message 69906)
Posted 2 Jun 2016 by Vortac
Post:
Well, it's certainly possible BOINC will diminish when fully commercial and more controlled platforms become available. As Egilman said, people are in it for bucks. And scientists too, we might add.

Anyway, in this context, Gridcoin could actually strengthen BOINC. I guess it would be possible to acquire the computational power of the Gridcoin team quite quickly with some Gridcoins and for a scientist with a limited budget that would certainly be more affordable than Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure (which are still quite expensive). It hasn't been done yet, but it's feasible enough, although still clunky and unstraightforward for someone who isn't familiar with cryptocurrencies and/or BOINC. Golem project looks far more advanced on paper, but it's still in early development, while BOINC is here and working.
2) Message boards : Questions and problems : [Discussion] 4th Generation BOINC credit system (Message 69902)
Posted 2 Jun 2016 by Vortac
Post:
You gain some, you lose some. Fully commercial distributed computing networks will certainly be profit-driven, corporate-controlled and non-independent. But they will attract more people to the idea of distributed computing, hopefully providing scientists with more computing power in the long run.

In the end, I think the best idea is to let the users decide if they want to donate their CPU time completely for free (pure BOINC) or to join something like the Golem project and let the Big Company run unknown, proprietary code on their machines, with little or no control over the process, but also getting paid for it. Or join Gridcoin and get a token reward, but also lose some of the BOINC freedoms (cannot join another team, cannot get rewarded for every BOINC project etc). Or join Folding@home and get rewarded in Curecoin or Foldingcoin. Or join Sia and rent your hard-drive for Siacoins. There are endless possibilites and the more powerful machine you have, more options will be available to you. Let the users choose.
3) Message boards : Questions and problems : [Discussion] 4th Generation BOINC credit system (Message 69857)
Posted 31 May 2016 by Vortac
Post:
Egilman, you are right - fully commercial distributed computing networks are already in development, but not by Gridcoin. Most likely they will be based on Ethereum, whose market value (as we write this) is 500 times bigger than Gridcoin and still growing. So, your worries are indeed justified - people are in it for bucks and tomorrow they will happily switch to the network which pays more. It's just not happening here. You are giving altruism lessons to the wrong people.




Copyright © 2024 University of California.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.