neuralnetwork.tex

\section{Neural Network}

This chapter starts with a disclaimer as the Gridcoin Neural Network [61] does not share anything with neural networks as commonly defined in the field of Artificial Intelligence. The Gridcoin Neural Network is charged with assigning Gridcoins to BOINC researchers. It is a kind of proportional calculation as we will see in the following chapters.

Gridcoin uses a distributed system to come to a consensus how much work was done by each user. For this purpose each node of the network, each Gridcoin client in other words, asks each BOINC project server, what the current Recent Average Credit of each member of team Gridcoin is. This information is mined in a special block called a Superblock. This information is hashed, so each node does not see the exact information from other nodes, but the hash can be compared and it can be found out, if the hash of this node is the same as the majority hash of all nodes.

To become a part of the Neural Network, a researcher's Gridcoin client has to send a beacon (a special network packet) containing the CPID and the wallet's address. This is a transaction with a very small amount of Gridcoins that links  the CPID  and wallet-address of this researcher in its meta-information, so that this information is now forever stored in the blockchain.