As you may or may not know, there are currently 5 polls underway that seek to help inform developers and organizers as they look to build a general roadmap for Gridcoin development through 2018.
Receiving Earned Research Rewards
Proof of Research Blockchain
Determining Magnitude
Solving the Stake Weight Problem
Securing Superblocks
It is important that we continue open and honest conversations regarding the development of all of these proposals.
TheCharlatan, known by many, loved by all, recently reached out with the request that some thoughts of his regarding Proof of Research Blockchain be delivered to the community. I am happy to share them here.
For those who do not know TheCharlatan, he is a major developer and contributor on the Gridcoin core development team.
He will be paying attention to this thread and may respond directly on a subsequent CCT thread -- he does not have a steemit account. Regardless of TheCharlatan's direct responses to this thread, which will be relayed if requested, we could use this thread as a springboard for further discussion and exploration of the topic of making Gridcoin a Proof of Research Blockchain.
What are your reactions to TheCharlatan's thoughts?
What are you questions regarding a Proof of Research Blockchain?
What are your concerns regarding a Proof of Research Blockchain?
What are you thoughts regarding a Proof of Research Blockchain?
The following text is a direct copy of words written by TheCharlatan:
Note: I have added a few line-breaks to the text he sent me for ease of reading.
The purpose of Gridcoin is providing a secure and cheap way to reward people for work being done on BOINC with a tradeable asset. In this article I will assume that PoS v9 and secure verification of CPIDs and statistics is already implemented. It is to serve as a personal mission statement of where I want this project to go, what it stands for and how it can justify its existence.
Since the inception of Gridcoin, a lot of different reward economics, security models and kernels were tested.
Gridcoin is based on a simple idea, replace Proof of Work with Proof of Research. This is very naive. The word "Proof" should never be used with something that is not provable. For those that don't know, user magnitude is calculated from the RAC (Recent Acquired Credits) in project statistics files that the project servers provide for download. There is no guarantee that Research is actually being done, we rely on statistical methods and the integrity of statistics files to give as reasonable assurance that work units have been computed and delivered to a project server. This completely naive mentality needs to be changed to develop a robust and hardened protocol that can be somewhat relied on.
So far all attempts at tying some form of BOINC data into the actual block creation process, that is the probability of being allowed to create a block and pushing the blockchain forward in a set time interval, have led to catastrophic security holes. Some of which were exploited on livenet (in spring 2014 a successful attack was executed which resulted in global blockchain rollback) and some of which were patched early enough. The patches either introduced more obscurity, that was later exploited again (like the obfuscated email addresses), or introduced even more centralized approaches at verifying the BOINC statistics. The lesson from these continuous experiences should be clear though:
The probability of creating a block should not rely on any work unit data. Even if the magnitude of a user is compromised, or tampered in some way, it should not influence any transactions happening in the chain, nor should he be able to attack the block chain itself with this. Thus the probability of producing a valid block should only rely on Proof of Stake, according to Gridcoin's philosophy of not wasting resources on Proof of Work. On the other hand we want the reward to be heavily biased towards computed work units. While the magnitude should not influence the ability to stake a block, it should very much account for how much you are owed as an extra block subsidy for a found Proof of Stake block.
Verifying BOINC work units is not an alternative to Proof of Work. Proof of Stake in of itself is fast, environmentally friendly and works more than well enough to push the blockchain forward. This is not a good reason to justify the project in comparison to other cryptocurrencies, especially not with systems like SPARC that reward BOINC crunchers, or existing tokens like XRP (Ripple) being minted/rewarded to BOINC users.
Whatever is proposed in future, the integrity of the blockchain should always come first. Using magnitude as a boost for the probability on who gets to solve the next block proved to be a bad idea.
There are however very good reasons why our protocol is not that bad after all, and I think Gridcoin should be promoted based on these:
It further incentivizes running a full node, since we not only have stakers, but also miners that want to claim their reward. Even with an average magnitude and just a few coins, it is still possible to solo stake. This is very healthy for the network and any form of delegation, or centralization of reward issuance will undermine this.
From these BOINC miners it can be assumed that a majority of identities (CPIDs) are honest. They follow whatever rules are dictated in the client and can be expected to not change them. In the case of Proof of Stake, this is very much desired. As long as the network is this decentralized, with thousands of honest nodes taking part, it greatly reduces the odds of a nothing at stake attack, which is a quite naive attack, where nodes during a fork continue to attempt to find a valid stake output to create a block on all forks.
Voting. Having a CPID with some attached magnitude and transactions associated with that CPID provides a provable form of identity on the network. While it is possible to still create multiple identities, this makes it much harder resources wise, and far easier to detect. Also you can flexibly choose how to weigh spent votes. Correlating ballots measured by stake weight, CPID count, or magnitude gives a very clear picture of what the network thinks about a proposal. With regards to voting, having a system capable of verifying external data (CPID statistics) embedded into our client is a huge advantage over other existing cryptocurrencies. Especially if that external data is tied to some expended work to further science.
With all the talk about block size and transaction scaling, it is worth to note that Gridcoin could handle about 5 times the transactions compared to Bitcoin.