Everyone that participates in Gridcoin knows that it is a fantastic idea. Instead of wasting power for useless hashes as in Bitcoin, you get paid for doing scientific work. That is so great!
But Gridcoin also has problems. It part they are based on the simple fact that Gridcoin does not have the allure of all the get-rich-quick coins out there. Gridcoin is serious “business”. It is science. And science takes time and effort.
(btw: This article is no blame game. I just want to point out problems I see, which is a sort of personal illness. The goal is to work on those problems.)
The Gridcoin community is also split around the world, most members haven’t met a single other Gridcoin participant.
At the same time we have a “Foundation” with (thanks to the increase in worth of Gridcoin in the last 2 years) relatively huge funds. From this compensations for devs are payed.
But what sounds like a great thing to have also puts up questions: How is decided who gets paid how much, who has the control?
Currently there was a “test” period for paying 30$ for programming hours. This has run out and a poll was made – for 60$.
WTF? Probably most people seeing the poll thought. Why double? Where is the discussion?
And what about the programming-related stuff that is not coding?
We all know that the last big update didn’t went that well. Heavy forking for weeks and downed exchanges are poison for the coin and the idea behind it.
At the same time not even the wallet updates were announced in the important channels (not to mention that there are a LOT of channels).
Also I cannot remember that people were asked to join Testnet to test the new version. Maybe I have missed it or it was not even done. Either way, more people in Testnet may have prevented this forking disaster.
And there are a lot of other things. Just now this was on slack:
Peppernrino [12:47 AM]
how do the people in here feel about our tweeting schedule? i feel it's a bit anorexic, and could use some more content...
looking for suggestions on how to beef up our social media presence.
this is a community endeavour, after all.
the voices of the underlings get ignored all too often.
would you like to see more contests?
BOINC challenges?
other cool science articles not involving gridcoin?
open source development initiatives?
There are a lot questions, and I am sure there are more.
There is a lot of stuff that is unknown to the average user if you aren’t hunting it all the time, for example: Who has access to the twitter account? Or even: What is the name of the account?
I have quite a bit of experience in internet-only volunteer things, and I can assure you, if it weren’t for our greed ;) this project would already have crumbled.
I don’t want this to happen. I want Gridcoin to boost science, make a more eco-friendly coin than the PoW coins are and, which would be really nice, pay my retirement.
What problems do you see and what questions as a Gridcoin miner do you have? (I could have written more but decided to wait for feedback.)
