I'm interested in this, but I don't see how BOINC has the properties needed to secure a cryptocurrency.  I think a lot of people saw possible problems with it and stayed away.  How did Gridcoin manage the problems involved? 

First, a lot of BOINC problems are linear (fastest computer wins ALL the time, rather than in proportion to speed).

Second, it doesn't usually happen, as I understand it, that everybody is working on the SAME problem - some get easier and some get harder. 

Third, it makes their servers a bottleneck and a vulnerability - people have to contact these servers to get a new problem every round, the block chain dies if the servers ever go down, and somebody could arrange to get "easy" problems if the operators collude or can be bribed. 

I'm not saying there's no way for it to work; I just don't know how to engineer around these issues.

Just replied to a similar question in another thread:
https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/624223.msg10981889#msg10981889

Basically because not that many people stake their coins, they leave them on an exchange or the leave them offline. So, if a major exchange gets hacked and 5 or 10% of the available coin supply gets stolen, this can be more than enough coins to do a 51% attack, since not everyone/most people don't leave their wallets staking all the time. This vulnerability (related to centralized exchanges) just doesn't exist for PoW coins. The fairly recent hacks and thefts of Mintpal/Vericoin and Bter/NXT are real world examples of this.

See ur other post. Once we have determined reality, we can talk more  

It seems what they call is not a way to secure the network, it's just some crazy experiment with loans or something like that.

I think in this topic this should be intended as proof-of-importance, which is used at NEM.


Interesting, what I know about proof-of-activity is more like this: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zDlGZn7sICIA8bUPhe6jPPzGOxA4YgTgi6J4XilFpgs/edit

What coblee described it sounds to me like the proof-of-transaction (Fluttercoin) and proof-of-importance (NEM) schemes. I dislike these two.

What that payment is for, in the long run, is securing the network.  

The miners contribute directly to security in a PoW network, but the network still isn't secured if there aren't a meaningfully large number of full nodes available.  

And so far, both PoW and PoS schemes have failed to broadly reward people for keeping a full node up.  Somebody who does that, deserves a full share of that payment regardless of their hashing power or capital invested.  

So, if you want a protocol to survive in the long run, I think it's vital to find a way to provide an incentive for people to keep nodes up - reliably, not just if they win some hugely biased lottery (that they have no chance at without million-dollar investments) and get a chance to form a block.  

I think a coinbase transaction every block with fifty outputs - one fairly-big one of maybe half the award for the miner, and forty-nine others distributed semi-randomly to full nodes that happen to be up at that very minute - would be a good idea regardless of whether you determine block formation via PoW or PoS.

Hmmmm....  Now that I think of it, I have an idea .....