Link to first letter
https://medium.com/@jringo/this-is-an-open-letter-that-was-posted-on-boinc-forums-on-august-9th-5eba7aaee1e0
​
Hello again, BOINC teams
​
First let us say that we are again posting on a select number of project forums because we would like to reach the most number of teams without spamming across all the projects. We were told that this is the sub-forum that is most active. If you find this inappropriate, please move or delete the post and accept our apologies.
​
Now.
​
We return with another request for help involving the removal of the Gridcoin team requirement.
​
Thanks to the participation of a couple testers that dove right in, we were able to confirm the functionality of the team requirement removal mechanisms fairly quickly.
​
As such, we have begun phase 2 of testing: the phased roll-out of the Gridcoin team requirement removal. This roll-out began with the release of the Gridcoin client version 4.0.5
​
Phase 2 testing seeks to confirm the scaling capabilities of the mechanisms required to remove the Gridcoin team requirement.
​
For phase 2 testing we are looking for a number of teams to slowly add to a “team whitelist”. Members of teams on the team whitelist will be capable of earning GRC for their computation contributions to Gridcoin whitelisted BOINC projects.
​
After a sufficient number of teams have been added to the whitelist, if everything is running smoothly, once we release 4.1.0.0 (Fern), we will completely remove the team requirement. Once the team requirement is removed, any person contributing computation to a whitelisted BOINC project, regardless of their team, will have the option to earn GRC for their work.
​
The teams that helped in phase 1 testing have already been added to the team whitelist. This means that their crunchers are capable of earning GRC for their work, should they so choose.
​
Those teams are:
- The Final Front Ear
- GPU Users Group
​
We plan on adding more teams to the whitelist over the coming weeks. While we might have to choose teams to add, we would much rather add teams that actively want to help in this second phase of testing. Instructions for becoming a team on the team whitelist are detailed below.
​
We are using a phased roll-out out of an abundance of caution with regards to testing the team requirement removal. Remember: every cruncher will have access to GRC rewards at the end of this process, regardless of their team. We do not recommend switching teams if your team does not want to be involved in phase 2 testing. The benefit for doing so will be negligible.
​
We expect phase 2 testing to be completed by the end of 2019.
​
Instructions:
​
To be one of the teams that helps with phase 2 testing of the Gridcoin team requirement removal:
​
- Discuss it among your team
- Have your team leader contact jringo (core organizer) or Jim Owens (core developer and very long standing BOINCer -- https://www.boincstats.com/stats/-1/user/detail/13042401404/overview)
​
You can reach us via:
​
Slack
​
https://join.slack.com/t/teamgridcoin/shared_invite/enQtMjk2NTI4MzAwMzg0LTUzMmY0YjdiNzYxYzQ0MDc3MGE1NjQ3Nzg2NWMzZTUzMjAwZjdhMWI1YWUzMDE4YzQyZjVjMjMzOTc1M2RmMmM
​
Discord
https://discord.gg/jf9XX4a
​
Email
jringo@gridcoin.world
james.owens@gridcoin.us
​
From there, you will be shown how to:
​
- Setup the Gridcoin wallet
- Register a beacon (the way the blockchain monitors computation contributions)
- Receive GRC or join the pool
- Build magnitude (crunch whitelisted BOINC projects)
- Stake a block (leave the wallet running)
​
---
​
Thank you in advance to anyone that wants to help!

I poked around the Gridcoin website a bit and read the whitepaper, but I'm still a bit confused about exactly what Gridcoin is offering at the cruncher level and if there are any trade-offs.

Will Gridcoin compensate their cruncher members with GRC for simply doing the exact same BOINC crunching that we are currently doing?

If so, what does Gridcoin get out of the transaction?

Gridcoin is just offering some incentive to participate in citizen science via distributed computing. So you earn some actual financial incentive for your crunching other than the "feel goods" for crunching for your favorite projects.

Gridcoin has been around for several years but required membership in the Gridcoin Team to earn coins via the GridPool or Solo. This new action by the developers is just to transition into an open-team footprint where you can stay in your existing team yet still earn Gridcoin for your distributed computing. You still only earn coin for the "whitelisted" projects but the ones on the current whitelist are some of the most popular. Also projects can get voted out or into the whitelist depending on what the existing Gridcoin participants vote. The whitelist is here:
https://gridcoin.us/Guides/whitelist.htm
The Gridcoin "mission statement" is here:
https://gridcoin.us/

There are no tradeoffs. You crunch normally all your projects. All that is required for staking is to keep the wallet active or at least enabled once in a while.

---

Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Thanks for the info, Keith. That summed up my general understanding of the matter, and it certainly would be nice to earn a tiny bit of money, which would most likely just go back into my crunching effort.

I have a basic understanding of crypto currency, but I still don't understand where the money comes from in this BOINC/Gridcoin/Cruncher relationship scenario. Why would someone pay me to do exactly what I am currently doing for free? Are the projects compensating Gridcoin somehow, and that money gets passed along to us crunchers in the form of GRC? Do some of my computing resources go to directly mining Gridcoin, and that is how they benefit?

Basically, my overarching question is what does Gridcoin get out of the deal, and how do they get it?

You need to comprehend the basic tenets of blockchain to understand what your computer is doing. It is basically validating the new blocks added onto the end of the blockchain. Your computer doesn't use much in the way of its resources to process the blockchain. It does take up some space for storage for the blockchain and there is some initial download activity to load the blockchain. But you can grab a recent snapshot of the blockchain to get to 80% of the way to the top of the blockchain to reduce the initial download. After that there really is very little download activity while the wallet is open and synced. Certainly a lot less than the megabytes and gigabytes we download in new work units. You just crunch for your projects normally and get rewarded for your efforts.

The way that the coin makes money is through "inflation". There is a maximum amount of Gridcoin that can be mined just like with all crypto currencies. You can check the trading prices of current GRC against the other popular crypto coins.
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/gridcoin/
You would typically exchange your earned GRC for another coin like BTC or ETH to purchase things or convert to USD or other fiat. GRC has very low volume compared to other coins. The value would improve if the volume of trade increased. One of the things that opening up the team requirement might enable if more people mined GRC.

---

Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Thanks, Keith. I had mostly ignored Gridcoin until I saw that the GPU Users Group was now heavily involved in the transitional testing. Made it worth another look. I'm also researching this quite a bit on my own, but I have two more quick questions since I assume you and others have acquired quite a bit of first hand knowledge about incorporating Gridcoin into your crunching.

Very roughly, can you or anyone else provide any actual metrics for the resource impact you have observed when running with Gridcoin compared to running without?

I understand the GRC returns for crunching are dynamic and layered, but can you provide a rough estimate of the returns you see relative to S@H credit?

Thanks, Keith. I had mostly ignored Gridcoin until I saw that the GPU Users Group was now heavily involved in the transitional testing. Made it worth another look. I'm also researching this quite a bit on my own, but I have two more quick questions since I assume you and others have acquired quite a bit of first hand knowledge about incorporating Gridcoin into your crunching.

Very roughly, can you or anyone else provide any actual metrics for the resource impact you have observed when running with Gridcoin compared to running without?

I understand the GRC returns for crunching are dynamic and layered, but can you provide a rough estimate of the returns you see relative to S@H credit?

Ha ha LOL. I haven't seen ANY returns yet as I haven't staked yet. Ian was the other tester from GPUUG and I don't think he has staked yet either. Mike Andrews from The Final Front Ear team was the other tester and he actually did stake the other day and received 510 GRC for his crunching. So he is the first open-team beta tester on Mainnet to actually earn coin. It has to do with the amount of GRC in your wallet, the amount of difficulty, your magnitude and finally the roll of the dice whether you stake a block to the blockchain and earn coin for your contribution. There is a rough ETTS (Estimated Time To Stake) formula that is 10000 / Wallet balance of GRC * Difficulty = Number of days to stake. You share the rewards between all the other participants. The lesser the amount of participants you crunch along with for any project, the greater your share of the rewards. So if you crunch for a project with few other Gridcoin members, you get a greater share. So the unpopular projects reward better. This mechanism boosts the popularity of the under subscribed project which is good for the project in the end.

My wallet calculates out to around 15 days till I stake. The only caveat to be aware of is you need to stake every 180 days at minimum or you will lose your estimated Proof or Research awards as the blockchain renews every 180 days. So the rule of thumb is to stake early and stake often. And that means keeping the wallet running on the host. Oh BTW, you only need to run the wallet on one host, no matter how many hosts you have crunching.

To your question on impact to the host. HTOP is showing around .7% of a cpu and around 6.3% of memory. So around a GB of my system memory. The Gridcoinresearch folder is occupying around 4.8GB of drive space.

[Edit] Don't have an answer about what amount of RAC = the amount of GRC awarded is here at Seti. Mike doesn't crunch for Seti I think. Didn't find him in the Final Front Ear active members here. So he earned his GRC crunching for the other whitelisted projects. Can't make a guess as to what his magnitude or difficulty was for what he earned.

I tested on Testnet also and am also running a testnet wallet alongside the Mainnet wallet. Testnet is a beta testing wallet, where you earn research awards but not actual real GRC. We call it monopoly money. I stake around 7-8 times a day on that wallet with a magnitude of 3847 and difficulty of 0.236. I have testnet balance of 32150 GRC currently. There are a lot fewer participants in testnet so my share of the pot is greater. Testnet is where the developers test out the next release of the application before releasing to Mainnet. My participation and success there is why the limited team whitelist of GPUUG team and The Final Front Ear team got implemented to Mainnet. Jim Owens needs more team participations to test out the scalability as per his original post.

---

Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Very roughly, can you or anyone else provide any actual metrics for the resource impact you have observed when running with Gridcoin compared to running without?

I understand the GRC returns for crunching are dynamic and layered, but can you provide a rough estimate of the returns you see relative to S@H credit?

I was not aware of the policy change that is going on concerning clubs and GRC earnings. I was in the A&M club for a long time but switched to gridcoin to earn coins.

I might be able to help with a rough estimate. This url shows my earning. Going to reproduce the values here as they change with time:

The following is my "magnitude" as of 29 Aug, the end of the WOW project. I ran 7 hosts but only worked on SETI and WCG. The other projects show a residual magnitude as results were turned in before the start of WOW are finally paying. Note that there is a large ratio of magnitude [seti =to= gpugrid] but the RAC is not as large a ratio about 5:4. Basically that says SETI paid more over 5:1 compared to credits earning by under GPUGrid.




so what did that magnitude turn into as gridcoin?

This image shows the last 4 payouts. All payouts occurred after the start of the WOW So the total magnitude of 353.71 turned into 280+104+206+ (probably only half of)461 about 850-1000 grc total but of which the WOW contributed about 2/3 of that or guessing about 600 grc for SETI & WCG during the last 2 weeks. Not even close to my electric bill in value.

May I ask where you got your stats from? Was that from the Block Explorer link in the wallet?

---

Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

May I ask where you got your stats from? Was that from the Block Explorer link in the wallet?

funny you should ask that as I inadvertently closed that stats window before I had finished the post and it took about 15 minutes of googling before I could find it again.

gridcoinstats.eu has stats on everyone on gridcoin just hard to lookup up "leaders"

at that .eu site click on the "network" tab then select "cpid's and magnitude"

I then did a search for my userid. jstateson and clicked on it.

Note the original poster (James) is listed and has a huge RAC with Collatz but the magnitude is really low with Einstein paying more GRC for a lot less credit points. Just shows how Collatz is over rated in credits. I personally don't consider it much of a math project let alone a research project.

Keith and JStateson - Thanks for all the info. I still have a lot of research to do, but it seems like an interesting endeavor.

I thought that was where it came from. I don't find myself there I assume cause I haven't staked yet. I'll look up the leaderboard to see the project popularity.

---

Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Looks like I just picked up my first Proof of Research stake for 510 GRC. Once it matures, I should be able to find my transaction and status details at Gridcoinstats.

---

Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

I also received a 510 GRC POR today.

I thought I would recieve more since I have higher stake amount and higher magnitude. hmmm.

edit:
got a response from the slack page. It's a "first time" cap. the amount will vary on the next payouts.

---

Seti@Home classic workunits: 29,492 CPU time: 134,419 hours

Good answer on Slack about optimizing the staking efficiency.

---

Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Very roughly, can you or anyone else provide any actual metrics for the resource impact you have observed when running with Gridcoin compared to running without?

You only need to run the Gridcoin Wallet on one machine, and it doesn't need to be your main cruncher, it just needs to have enough RAC to be counted. There is a small computational overhead and some network traffic.
My Gridcoin machine shows 11 gb of network traffic, and 34 hours of CPU time (1 thread an old i3) over the last month. I guess if it wasn't running gridcoin it could have run a handful more WUs, but the overhead isn't great, and would be even less with a better machine.

The idea behind Gridcoin is that most crypto-currencies are basically just doing maths for the sake of doing maths, and that's a lot of electricity being used for no "real" gain. Gridcoin uses the peer to peer networking and blockchain, but pays out based on the BOINC work that's actually done, not the artificial work that's done by other systems.

So I still have machines in the GRCPool group, and get small regular payouts via that. You need to get hold of some coins in your wallet before you are able to stake, the pool lets you add your RAC to the overall pool, which then stakes regularly, and you get paid out once your share has built up. Once my wallet had built up enough I switched my machine from "Investor" to "Staking", and it's able earn it's own coins directly, with it's total "magnitude" based on several machines that are on my account. I'm only small scale, but I have mined 3 blocks this month, so it's "working",

From my pool machines, RAC (across various projects) 40,900.
Magnitude 18.8
Estimated payout 3.3 coins per day.

Like I said, small scale. Guys with a RAC of 1,000,000 are going to be collecting a lot more.

Yes indeed. Collatz generates competitive magnitude for me, because my cards are all good. NVidia 980 +. But Collatz's credits are ridiculous. This is precisely why we use the relative RAC system to compute magnitude, rather than absolute RAC values. Credits do NOT equal cobblestones...

Here is a link to my CPID stats in case people are curious...

https://www.gridcoinstats.eu/cpid/bc0621a4ac4610ffa400a0d298c02e23#

---

Is there a website explaining how to set this all up?

Is there a website explaining how to set this all up?

https://gridcoin.us/

---

Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Gridcoin has a youtube channel as well with lots of instructional videos. Some are better than others.