Under the current model, a researcher who is running a BOINC project awards BOINC credit in accordance with his/her perceived value in completing some work unit. Maybe that's tied to the number of flops needed to compute the work unit, but essentially it is up to the researcher to distribute those credits equitably based on the 'value' being provided to the researcher. On the Gridcoin end, RAC is used to try to distribute GRC in a way which matches the distribution of BOINC credit which has been done by said researcher (within one project). Right now, we treat all projects on the whitelist equally in terms of GRC/project/day.

There is a profit motive in GRC which pushes users towards under-crunched projects. No one is being 'punished' for crunching popular projects. A person makes a choice based on a mixture of motivations, monetary reward is only one of them. If you are crunching a project which makes you feel good about taking part in a particular field of research, then that feeling is part of your reward. If someone else is purely optimizing for GRC reward then that is their prerogative.

I don't understand why you want to down-rate people who are using more capable or more efficient hardware. If GRC can motivate people to use more efficient computation to provide more 'value' to a project's researchers, isn't that a good thing? It's nice to put some old or otherwise inefficient hardware to use towards scientific computing, but is it necessary to demand they get paid based on how much heat they produce rather than how much scientific 'value'?

This sounds to me like a lot of extra work to ask of the system (when you consider the importance of growth), which would require some further degree of centralization and possibly create new security holes or avenues for abuse (how hard would it be to spoof what hardware I'm using for something with a higher TDP?). This could be the basis for an interesting statistical analysis to understand how much energy is being used by different projects, which could provide value to the BOINC/GRC community, but I don't think it has any place in the rewards mechanism whatsoever.

If the real issue is a perceived difference in the value of different projects, and as a community we think that different projects should have a different amount of GRC distributed amongst their crunchers, there are simpler and more robust ways of addressing those issues.

Thanks for thinking about the rewards mechanism and its inherent questions of fairness and bringing out a new idea which tackles the frustrations and issues you see. The conversation is essential to trying to improve the system.