Gridcoin Greenpaper - A Proposal for a Closed Loop Economic System

[keegreil]

Hi everyone! I've written my first cryptocurrency paper, submitted here for critique and peer review. This is draft 0.1 and I fully expect to make changes and updates. I'll be making the excel file with my calculations and sources available shortly after I clean it up a bit. Extracted here are the summary and acknowledgements:

Summary

Purchasing computing power on the Gridcoin network is several orders of magnitude cheaper than any alternative. Selling a portion of the network’s computational power to respectable for-profit companies would re-fund the Foundation, increase and stabilize the value of the GRC currency, and provide closed economic flows to the Gridcoin economy. In the long term, this may facilitate the capture of a large portion of the Ethereum network’s GPU infrastructure…for science.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to J-Ringo, Jim Owens, RoboticMind, ILikeChocolate, and the many other Gridcoiners that encouraged me to dive in and contribute some ideas.
If you thoroughly enjoyed this paper and simply must tip the author, here is my wallet address:
S1fSQwAJD5bzBCucsCRs6kPUCwhfGAEEFt
But most of all, I hope you generate your own better ideas and share those back. Sincerely,
-AgentP
Gridcoin Greenpaper V0.0.1.pdf
Gridcoin Greenpaper v1 For Poll.pdf

13 June 2021 Edits: I have incorporated feedback from the community and finished the second draft of the proposal. I believe this to be ready for a public poll and (if approved) implementation. Major changes are:

• Removing the "rainbymagnitude" RPC command as a suggested method of payment. I am concerned that a large number of Greenlist crunchers could skew votes and polling in favor of for-profit projects at the expense of the whitelist. Greenlist crunchers should not receive magnitude, and thus rainbymagnitude would be impossible.
• Removing the Funding Limit. It is not enforceable. See details on page 7.
• The "Service Fee" was renamed to be a "Listing Fee" to better capture what it is actually for. Greenlisting merely amounts to the network's public endorsement of a project, and includes prominent listing on major Gridcoin websites alongside the Whitelist, and possibly a dedicated channel on the Gridcoin Discord. Since RPC commands were removed, this would simply be paid once per quarter to maintain a spot on the public list. I proposed the same 20% of GRC paid to crunchers for the previous 3 months, however I acknowledge this may be difficult to enforce. First 3 months are free, which allows businesses to trial run it with limited additional expense.
• Added a number of optional things that would strengthen the overall effort.

[keegreil]

Here's the TLDR version for anyone who doesn't feel like reading 11 pages of me rambling :)

• This construct aims to siphon GPUs off Ethereum's Proof of Work by raising the price of GRC (in $ terms). This is done by increasing demand.
• The Greenlist would allow for-profit projects to be advertised and listed on Gridcoin alongside the Whitelisted projects. Greenlisted projects would not be given minted GRC and would not be seen by the scraper/magnitude system at all.
• They get on the Greenlist by passing a poll. Every 3 months they renew their spot on the list by paying a Listing Fee to the Foundation Fund (20% of the amount they paid in GRC to their crunchers the previous 3 months). First 3 months free!
• These projects would buy GRC on the open market to pay to their crunchers. Currently the cost of renting power on Gridcoin is about 500 times cheaper than the next cheapest alternative.
• At approximately $0.29, "mining" GRC on a whitelisted project becomes more profitable than mining Ethereum.

[kjreills]

I know most of the discussion on this has happened on Discord and Fireside, but I had a few thoughts and figured I would bring some discussion back over here.

First, I think this is a great idea. It seems like an excellent way to expand the reach of Gridcoin by reducing barriers to entry and increasing profitability over time.

One key point that I think is worth discussing has to do with the reduction in barrier to entry. Individuals who are crunching on Greenlisted projects will be earning GRC that is not minted. This means that they do not need to have a starting balance in order to solo crunch, as they do not need to stake in order to receive their rewards. I think this is a great way to allow individuals to join the network and immediately start earning GRC without having to make an initial investment. However, we should note that this may cause some reduction in the number of pool crunchers, or at least in the number of new crunchers who decide to do pool crunching. Some will likely decide to just crunch Greenlist until they have enough to stake on a regular basis. Unless the Greenlist is too competitive in terms of earnings potential, in which case I would expect to see new individuals joining and doing both. But either way, we should try to prioritize making a way to easily see the best projects to crunch for your hardware, in order to help smooth out these market dynamics.

I also think forking the BOINC manager provides some opportunities for reducing barriers to entry. It could start with listing the whitelisted and Greenlisted projects and then later we may be able to find opportunities to make things like the beacon process more seamless or even automated. And if we can gather hardware profiles on different projects, we could even recommend projects directly in the BOINC manager GUI, based on the hardware it is running on. All of these things could greatly increase adoption of Gridcoin and BOINC, and we could get a lot of science done.

Finally, as adoption and visibility increase, the price should also increase, and even modest Greenlisting fees should be able to sustain the foundation and development indefinitely. All in all, I think this is a great proposal, and any investments we make to help this along will also help Gridcoin as a whole.