[nctr]

There is already such a currency, it is called gridcoin.

The network consensus is reached by Proof of Stake instead of Proof of work, so no computational cycles are "wasted" on proof of work. But how much stake you get with is also determined by the amount of research you contribute to the BOINC group gridcoin relative to the total research done in this group. See further details there:

http://wiki.gridcoin.us/Proof-of-Research

So there is two ways to mine gridcoin: with the normal proof of stake, which means you get an interest rate whenever you use your votes to secure the network and an additional "proof of research" bonus that you get with the stakes and that depends on your relative contribution to the gridcoin-BOINC team: http://boincstats.com/en/stats/-1/team/detail/118094994/over...

There are certain projects whitelisted, folding@home is one of them but there are many more.

What makes this even more interesting is the idea of commercial BOINC projects. As soon as you have a system where the inflation/money printing process depends on the computation power given to BOINC, BOINC projects to forecast stocks, AI, general machine learning tasks.. could also be created. Then this would be the first currency that has internal value, because the money in the inflation process does not come out of thin air but is based on computing power that is either used for science or for computing projects that deliever value.

The forum where the development is discussed is here: https://cryptocointalk.com/forum/464-gridcoin-grc/

[vanzard]

Gridcoin's proof-of-research is not decentralized: it relies on the BOINC project servers. So it shares all the same centralization flaws as FoldingCoin which relies on the Folding@Home servers.

Gridcoin is a little different because if you remove the BOINC project servers, it is not centralized anymore, and only relies on proof-of-stake. But this would make it no different that the many proof-of-stake altcoins that already exist.

[nctr]

yes that is correct, the currency itself is decentraliced but the amount how much you mine additionally ("Proof of Research") depends on the BOINC project servers.

[traderman11]

In addition to all the Boinc work Gridcoin does, there is a real opportunity for commercial/custom Boinc projects like 3D rendering, stock options analysis and almost any kind of simulation you can think of. The potential here is endless. It is true that Boinc kinda makes Gridcoin a little bit centralized, but the benefits that are yielded are worth it I think.

[vanzard]

This "little bit" of centralization makes Gridcoin sufficiently brittle that it completely annihilates its chance of being widely successful AND stable.

Here is a thought experiment for you to understand: imagine if Gridcoin was as big and as valuable as Bitcoin, which has about $1 million dollars worth of bitcoins mined every day. A good chunk of this million dollars would be distributed based on BOINC rankings. So many people would be interested in gaining control of the BOINC servers. They could either hack them. Or they could offer to outright purchase the domain names and entity managing them, maybe they would even hire the staff running the servers. They would give appearances of operating legitimately at first. But eventually they would interfere with the rankings for their own financial benefits, either plainly maliciously, or with excuses to appear semi-legitimate (they could say "since we run the BOINC servers, we deserve a share of the profits"). The Gridcoin community would be upset and disagree with this. Maybe they would try to abandon trusting these BOINC servers, but how? They would not all agree on a solution. This would create forks in the chain. Maybe they would try to set up a new entity to run a new set of BOINC servers. At this point the situation is a mess and is no different than Ripple/Stellar to whom this exact scenario happened: part of the Ripple community abandoned Ripple and followed Jed McCaleb's Stellar fork.

Morale of the story: absolute power corrupts absolutely. You cannot give power to a central entity (BOINC servers) to control distribution of money. This is too much trust and is bound to break at some point.

And in addition to these social problems caused by centralization, what about the technical ones? What happens when the BOINC servers are down, ie. under DoS attack? How do you resolve gridcoin transaction conflicts which could be resolved by looking up the BOINC ratings? The whole gridcoin network would be unable to operate due to a few servers being down. On the other hand, a true distributed currency like Bitcoin does not depend at all on a single server. This is why being 100% fully distributed is incredibly superior to being 90% distributed like Gridcoin. Even if it was made 99% distributed, the 1% of centralization is what will eventually hamper it.

[nctr]

1) if the BOINC project servers were down then gridcoin would continue to function as a normal PoS coin and when they are online again you get the PoR bonus again

2) I think the BOINC foundation is very trustworthy and the advantages of contrubuting to science outweigh the disadvantages. Also BOINC itself is totally independent from gridcoin and well financed on its own for the public good of citizens contributing their computing power to science, so if they would tinker with the stats they lose their credibility and this would have consequences for them, eg. loss of fundingg or another team being funded to run the project servers, the software is open source anyway.

[vanzard]

1) When the BOINC servers come under DoS attack while gridcoin nodes are downloading the rankings, some nodes will have the rankings data, some will fail to get it. This would fork the gridcoin chain because some nodes will take into account the PoR bonuses (and all transactions using these coins), while others will reject them because they were unable to confirm the BOINC rankings. This fork would in effect break the gridcoin network until the BOINC servers come back online.

2) You can be as honest as possible, but many people still won't trust you. This is precisely why, eg., Stellar is not trusted and not embraced more widely, despite being set up as a non-profit foundation, with a charter, a voting system, being completely transparent, etc. People and companies around the world (especially those with a tendency to have anti-USA views) may not trust BOINC (hence gridcoin) because BOINC is operated in and funded by the USA. Do you think most, say, Chinese companies would be willing to fully embrace gridcoin, knowing it relies heavily on a US-based project like BOINC? No!

I can see your viewpoint though. People who care about science and who may already be BOINC users would probably like gridcoin. But most people in the world (unfortunately) don't care that much about BOINC, and when given the choice of Bitcoin or Gridcoin, they would probably go with the former (if only because of their anti-USA views, or because Bitcoin is already more widely accepted).

[TeMPOraL]

> BOINC projects to forecast stocks (...) could also be created.

That particular project would, IMO, defeat the whole purpose of gridcoin. The whole idea is to have computation do something actually useful, and if we'd be directing it into stocks (especially gridcoin stocks), it would be no different than bitcoin - i.e. wasting increasing amount of electricity just to support the very process of wasting it.

[nctr]

what do you mean with gridcoin stocks?

It's not cryptocurrency stocks but real world stocks, so yes you might argue about the benefit of these but there's certainly already a lot of money being made in this area.

But yes as of now all supported projects are science projects.