The Gridcoin Fireside
Tonight! August 29th at 8:00pm EDT
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The Gridcoin Fireside is a participatory podcast brought to you by the Gridcoin community. It is intended to introduce and explore DLT, cryptocurrency, and crypto-economics from a science oriented perspective.
The audience is welcome to participate through voice-comms or via the discord text chat.
Join us every Thursday at 8:00pm EDT on the Gridcoin discord server.
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Tonight!
Permissionless Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies - What they Solve, Part 1: Trust
While the [electronic payments] system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model.
What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.
- Satoshi Nakamoto
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Trust is a complex natural protocol that enables social interaction between individuals. It largely depends on a biological function drawn from a tribal library. It is difficult to maintain a natural web of trust beyond 100-200 individual people. This creates logical problems including tribalism and prejudice.
To overcome these problems, human societies manufactured protocols and processes that manage trust across large webs of individuals. For thousands of years, technological limitations demanded these protocols and processes be managed by people -- by arbiters of trust. In solving the problems of the tribal model, this trust-based model creates a significant problem: arbiters of trust hold incredible power.
Cypherpunks, crypto-anarchists, and others claim that a digital future secured by cryptography is the solution to this ancient problem. The Bitcoin blockchain was the first successful implementation of their proposed solution.
https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
https://activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html
Tonight we discuss how blockchain technology presents an alternative to the trust-based model of not only finance, but any protocol, process, or organization that relies on arbiters of trust.
See you soon!
Project brief
There is no project brief this week. Join us next week for a discussion on World Community Grid!
What is Gridcoin?
Gridcoin is a multi-incentive permissionless blockchain initiated in 2013. It mints and distributes cryptocurrency in relation to the processing power a network participant directs toward data-driven analysis and scientific discovery, as well as through a proof-of-stake reward mechanism. The Gridcoin blockchain monitors processing contributions to the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Networked Computing (BOINC). BOINC hosts major institutional computing projects such as IBM’s World Community Grid, SETI, and CERN, alongside projects developed by students, enthusiasts, mathematicians, researchers, and citizen scientists. Access to Gridcoin's computation resources is free, while computation contributors are incentivized with cryptocurrency minted by the Gridcoin protocol.
Want to Learn More?
Website: https://gridcoin.us
Discord: https://discord.gg/jf9XX4a
Steemit: https://steemit.com/created/gridcoin
White Paper: https://gridcoin.us/assets/img/whitepaper.pdf
-- Github --
Codebase: https://github.com/gridcoin/Gridcoin-Research
Community: https://github.com/gridcoin-community