https://cryptocointalk.com/topic/24622-dposbitshares-tool-kit/

Back when the Gridcoin community was looking for a safe haven away from emerging Scrypt ASICS (when GRC was Scrypt POW based), I proposed that we should have switched to using DPOS (back in December 2014!).

Gridcoin ended up picking Blackcoin's POSv2 mechanism instead of Bitshares' DPOS mechanism, but I've begun restarting the discussion over at cryptocointalk.

We're needing to scale from 2k users to 560k+ users, our main scalability issue is the neural network - currently each windows user gathers user XML files (some 1-2GB in size) from each whitelisted BOINC project & extracts team gridcoin stats to form the neural network with (to base GRC rewards with).

If we were to remove the team requirement, we could quite easily scale to 10's of thousands of users, but if we've got 10k+ (or 100k+) users all downloading these XML files, we'll be effectively DDOS'ing the projects. Several BOINC projects are based at universities or are home servers, not many could withstand this scenario.

If we had witnesses, they could gather the statistics to form the neural network instead of all users - drastically reducing the load our system places onto BOINC users.

We've been discussing this in the cryptocointalk thread and in the 9th/10th Gridcoin Community Hangouts (currently being edited, not live) - difficulties would lie in ensuring witnesses are providing identical neural network stats (punishing/catching witnesses deviating from legit stats) and in having witnesses pay BOINC users their owed rewards (rather than currently the case where end users are rewarded once they stake a block).

I'm open to discussing this in detail & would love to hear your thoughts on this idea.

Cheers,
CM.

Hey,

In episode #173 of BeyondBitcoin (https://steemit.com/beyondbitcoin/@officialfuzzy/guest-signups-beyond-bitcoin-hangout-173-9-16-16-rsvp-to-friday-s-hangout-refer-projects-for-rewards) I raised the following questions:

• Should we increase the quantity of BTS witnesses?
• Should we introduce witness vote degradation?

In BTSX we had 101+ witnesses, now we have 27 witnesses in BTS. Currently, witnesses earn approx $200/month. If in the future BTS increases significantly in value these positions will be earning more. The reason why I ask if we should increase the witness count is primarily because of the current witnesses slow reaction to implement price feeds.

Why I ask if we should introduce witness vote degradation:

• Campaigning for these witnesses positions has become almost non existent at this point (no witnesses in beyondbitcoin hangouts asking for votes for example)
• The witness sub-forum (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/board,61.0.html) has become a ghost town (witness channel on steemit isn't populated with BTS witness posts).
• Witnesses once voted in, unless their node degrades, are unlikely to be replaced by another prospective BTS witness. If we had voting degradation where after 'x' months your placed vote on a witness begins degrading over a period of 'y' months, we would see witnesses who actively campaign potentially becoming witnesses, replacing inactive BTS witnesses.
• Getting current witnesses to implement price feeds for new MPAs is quite difficult, I have been actively campaigning for witnesses to publish price feeds for the 'GRIDCOIN' MPA (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,22733.0.html). After 2.5 months and 3 BeyondBitcoin hangout appearances only 2 witnesses have published price feeds for the GRIDCOIN MPA. New witnesses may be more likely to interact with the BTS community.
• By introducing voting degradation, we may increase regular participation in the voting system rather than a 'vote once and forget' mindset right now.

During episode #173, crypto.prometheus raised the issue of due to the current low network voting participation, perhaps an individual armed with $500k they could vote their own witnesses into power - whilst true, on the other hand if an attacker had significant funds they could likely convince an active witness to sell their account (since they only get $200/month, if someone comes along with $10k+ they may be very tempted to take the offer).

Thoughts? No official proposal has been created in the client, just an informal discussion at this point.

Matching Steem post: https://goo.gl/s7xMiT

Best regards,
CM.

What is Project Rain?

'Project Rain' is the practice of distributing crypto assets to BOINC users based on their verified BOINC computation; it was initially devised within the Gridcoin network and has been expanded to multiple cryptocurrencies and all BOINC teams through this BOINC project.

BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) is an open-source volunteer oriented computing grid that combines the processing power of all individual users for the purposes of scientific research.

Think of Project Rain as a massive new share-dropping vector that doesn't require your end-users to handle their wallet private keys nor require proof of IRL identity.

I discussed Project Rain in episode #172 of BeyondBitcoin: https://steemit.com/beyondbitcoin/@officialfuzzy/guest-signups-beyond-bitcoin-hangout-172-9-9-16-rsvp-to-friday-s-hangout-refer-projects-for-rewards

Why would I 'Rain' an UIA upon BOINC users?
Similar to 'share dropping', Raining an UIA (or even a small % of the total supply) upon BOINC users both distributes your asset potentially further than an ICO or mining phase and purchases an user base with significant computing power at their disposal (Some BOINC users have thousands of cores and/or hundreds of GPUs).

There are approx 500k+ active BOINC users & 4 million+ registered users. There's serious potential to far exceed the scale of distribution that Auroracoin achieved.

Can I make a BOINC project?
You certainly can, anyone can create a BOINC project (there's no central authority behind BOINC project creation).
You could potentially 'rain' an UIA onto your volunteers/workers to encourage further computation or to assign voting weight for project decisions.

Have an idea for a project? Check out this steem thread (now frozen, damnit!): https://steemit.com/gridcoin/@cm-steem/brainstorming-new-boinc-projects-anyone-can-create-a-project-and-reward-their-users-with-gridcoin

What cryptocurrencies are supported?
Currently, 29 cryptocurrencies including Gridcoin, BTS, Peerplays, Heat Ledger & Steem are supported. More cryptocurrencies can be supported before launch if you request soon!

Here's a couple Steemit posts on Project Rain:
https://steemit.com/beyondbitcoin/@cm-steem/project-rain-update-regarding-development
https://steemit.com/boinc/@cm-steem/project-rain-distributing-crypto-assets-to-boinc-users-based-on-their-verified-boinc-computation
https://steemit.com/steem/@cm-steem/gauging-interest-would-you-be-interested-being-able-to-tip-boinc-users-your-crypto-asset-of-choice

Thoughts?
I'd love to hear your thoughts on 'Project Rain' and ideas of how you could utilize this functionality.

P.S. Attention of BTS witnesses!
BTS witnesses, please support the 'GRIDCOIN' MPA by publishing price feeds, please! https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,22733.msg298931.html#new

Hey,

I've been trying to get the 'GRIDCOIN' MPA (https://www.gridcoin.us) added to the python price feed script: https://github.com/grctest/python-graphenelib/blob/master/scripts/pricefeeds/config-example.py

http://cryptofresh.com/a/GRIDCOIN
https://bitshares.openledger.info/#/asset/GRIDCOIN

https://www.poloniex.com/exchange#btc_grc
https://c-cex.com/?lpm=btc&p=grc-btc
https://bittrex.com/Market/Index?MarketName=BTC-GRC

I've been unable to test the changes, I've run into several issues and am currently stuck at: http://pastebin.com/WTCGNCmw

Can some witnesses please check out the above? Unfortunately the script doesn't support c-cex, is 2 feed sources sufficient?

https://github.com/xeroc/python-graphenelib/pull/44

Thanks for your time.