There's always a little part of me that wants to be selfish, and mine as many coins as I can before offering up any ideas that could cause GridCoin adoption to explode.
Then I remember: that's not what GridCoin is about. We want to make distributed computing mainstream, so that any scientific endeavor that needs free CPU/GPU time can contact BOINC and BOINC will always have a plethora of willing crunchers.
What's the biggest hurdle for new GridCoin Crunchers/Miners?
I was asked this on Reddit today and I didn't have a great answer. Some people want to say it's the setup of both GridCoin and BOINC. I think that's a perfectly fine gripe, but I wouldn't call it a major hurdle. It's just going to take a little bit more of your Friday night than you were probably hoping for. We all sit behind the computer on Friday night anyway, right?
Right?
Actually, I don't want to know the answer to that.
After some thought, the biggest hurdle is after you get the GridCoin wallet going and you've got BOINC running, there's no clear-cut way to know which projects you should be crunching. You can get an indicator if you happen to find the Projects page on GridCoinStats.eu -- just pick the projects with the fewest number of users and you're set, right? Not really. It's a bit more complicated than that, and one could waste weeks trying out each project one-by-one and waiting for a few days to see what kind of Magnitude they're getting.
Would it be possible for us to build a whitelist table that would show a few pieces of additional data such as...
- Which projects are primarily GPU projects and which are primarily CPU projects?
- An estimate of how much Magnitude is earned per 1,000 units of RAC.
- An estimate of how much GridCoin is earned per 1,000 units of RAC.
- Perhaps a simple algorithm that takes the available data (GRC users, GRC users' average RAC, available workunits, etc) to rate each project on a scale of 1-10 on competitiveness.
I understand there are equipment considerations when trying to decide which project(s) a user should consider, but I think a handful of data points as simple as those above would prove invaluable for new users, especially considering GridCoin has no functioning profitability calculators at the moment. This would prevent new users who are looking to maximize profits from spinning their tires too much by arming them with enough data to at least get started, and it would take some heat off of us on the GridCoin subreddit who answer this question seemingly on a daily basis.
What do you folks think? Perhaps this could be something that could be set up on GRCGo.com or even on the GridCoinStats.eu website.
~XaqFields