[schoen]

Gridcoin's apparent decentralization is much less than a system that uses mining rewards because it uses a committee to maintain a list of projects that can simply assert that people have done relevant work in order to receive rewards.

https://gridcoin.us/guides/whitelist.htm

I haven't totally gamed it out but I think the committee could break Gridcoin by means such as refusing to approve any projects, or approving only "captive" BOINC projects that agree to distribute rewards the way the committee wants. Alternatively, BOINC itself could get shut down, or all of the currently-approved projects could have their credentials taken over by someone else and start issuing rewards in a sketchy way.

As I understand it, Gridcoin basically has an identified group of oracles who together appoint and unappoint other oracles who are empowered to issue rewards. While this is clever, it's not very decentralized or permissionless.

(Maybe I should pick on BOINC itself even more than the committee as the "authority" here, since I think BOINC's infrastructure is directly used by the whitelisted projects to assign tasks and announce rewards for completing them. So BOINC is really in a position to tamper with every part of the reward process.)