GRIDCOIN

Gridcoin - GRC

GridCoin is a new peer-to-peer internet based cryptocurrency that aims to provide real benefits to humanity by compensating the coin miners for participating in BOINC projects that may lead to advances in medicine, biology, mathematics, science, climatology, and astrophysics by concentrating a large percentage of the computational power towards BOINC research – instead of generating unnecessary heat and wasted power for the proof of work algorithms required to keep the coin network running.
It is estimated that bitcoin is using approximately 23,312 megawatt hours per day (see electric consumption at blockchain.info/stats (24 hour stats)) of electric for block solving algorithms.
The aim of the Gridcoin project is to shift the computational power primarily to BOINC projects while the mining operations become a second priority – so as the network is scaled up, BOINC utilization is scaled up in tandem.
The coin miners will be rewarded with a small token subsidy if they fail to mine BOINC shares, but a much larger subsidy when mining with BOINC .
This digital cryptocurrency allows instant peer to peer transactions, worldwide payments and very low processing fees. The source code is open source and allows everyone to take part in the success of the currency.
Gridcoin is based on the Bitcoin protocol but differs from Bitcoin in that it can be efficiently mined with consumer-grade hardware, therefore is not as likely to be replaced by specialized ASIC mining chips in the future Gridcoin provides faster transaction confirmations (2.5 minutes on average) and uses memory intensive scrypt-based proof-of-work algorithms to verify transactions.

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is an open source middleware system for volunteer and grid computing. It was originally developed to support the SETI@home project before it became useful as a platform for other distributed applications in areas as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, environmental science, and astrophysics. The intent of BOINC is to make it possible for researchers to tap into the enormous processing power of personal computers around the world.
BOINC has been developed by a team based at the Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) at the University of California, Berkeley led by David Anderson, who also leads SETI@home. As a high performance distributed computing platform, BOINC has about 444,335 active participants and 1,148,029 active computers (hosts) worldwide processing on average 6.870 petaFLOPS as of September 9, 2014. BOINC is funded by the National Science Foundation(NSF.
The framework is supported by various operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Android, Linux and FreeBSD. BOINC is free softwarewhich is released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

Gridcoin’s Features

Variable Block Reward: 

• Each whitelisted BOINC project is an opportunity for miners to compete for the variable block reward.
• The block reward ranges from 5-150 GRC; miners compete via contributing the most towards BOINC for a larger block reward.
• Rewards = ((User’s Individual Project RAC)/(Individual project AVG RAC))*150
• The block reward is halved roughly every 4 years (every 840,000 blocks).

Scrypt POW Mechanism:

• Proof of work for the verification of transactions is performed via the scrypt algorithm.
• We wish for GPUs to contribute towards BOINC projects, so we do not take an anti-asic stance.
• The gridcoin network is scheduled to produce approximately 168 million gridcoins (based on an average subsidy of 100 GRC), which is 8 times as many currency units as Bitcoin.

CPU Mining:

• CPU mining enables user with no scrypt mining capability to be rewarded purely for BOINC contributions in a fair manner.
• Users can only earn a block against each BOINC project once per POB lookup period.
• CPU mining can never exceed 50% of all blocks.

Wallet Encryption:

• Wallet encryption allows you to secure your wallet, so that you can view transactions and your account balance, but are required to enter your password before spending any Gridcoins.
• This provides protection from wallet-stealing viruses and trojans and acts as a sanity check before sending payments.

BOINC Whitelist:

• Gridcoin has implemented a BOINC project whitelist to prevent shenanigans and improve Gridcoin’s network security.
• The Gridcoin community is looking into creating a thorough whitelisting process; Stay tuned for more info!

Mandatory BOINC Participation:

• Because our goal is to further the progress of scientific research, all miners must participate in distributed computing through BOINC. Before Scrypt/CPU miners are able to mine a block, a minimum of 100 RAC must be achieved.
• This prevents miners swarming the gridcoin network without any boinc contribution

Scientific contribution offsetting carbon production:

• It is estimated that the Bitcoin network is currently using in excess of 76,000MWh a day of electricity on hashing sha256 alone.
• By creating a mandatory competitive reward mechanism based on contributing the most towards BOINC projects on top of existing cryptocurrency technology, we aim to justify our carbon production in the form of being the first scientific philanthropic cryptocurrency.

Educational grants & sponsorship:

• There is large potential for the Gridcoin community to become very philanthropic; sponsoring students in their masters years of study, sponsoring science fairs, helping universities setup their own BOINC virtual supercomputer for scientific research.
• When the Gridcoin foundation is established, we will be able to properly rally together and help out those in need with gridcoin.

Help advance science:

• With gridcoin, not only will you be rewarded with GRC – you’ll be helping to solve some of humanity’s biggest problems such as disease, cancer, etc.
• Even just by using gridcoin as a currency, you’ll be helping establish the gridcoin economy – ensuring the thousands of BOINC contributors are able to cover electricity costs.

Distributed Peer To Peer Model

Gridcoin uses a peer-to-peer network structure with no central authority to check the validity of blocks, no central authority for checkpoints, and no single point of failure for any operations. A failure from a single boinc project will NOT cause Gridcoin to stop operating. No credit check outage will cause Gridcoin to stop operating. No
central authority will disrupt production operations.

Proof Of Work Verification System

When users participate in Boinc projects, they are required to join Team Gridcoin (Designating ownership of Boinc Credits). As they perform work on projects, they generate cobblestones, or individual clock cycle credits of work for that project. The BOINC distributed servers share these credits and calculate a Recent Average Credit, or Total Credit Average over 30 days. Gridcoin uses the RAC figure as an indicator of the magnitude of work performed by node-project.

Proof Of Mining

In order for a Gridcoin node to mine, they must request a block template to be filled in with a Boinc CPID, Project Name, RAC, Email Hash, Boinc Public Key, and proof that the block is not in the chain already within the public Proof Of Boinc Lookback period (dynamic difficulty adjustment). If any of these steps fail, the miner will not
mine, or the block will not be accepted by the network.

Fraud

To prevent fraudulent blocks from being accepted, for example, when a miner purports to own an account, or falsifies the recent credit, or attempts to mine without a valid project, the block will be verified by another 3rd party node on the network. The 3rd party node callsnetsoft-online, a very well distributed BOINC credit check farm. If the block can be verified, the block will be accepted and confirmed; and this identical process repeated by a minimum of 6 nodes before becoming a permanent part of the block chain. If the block cannot be confirmed because the internet is down or the credit node is down, Gridcoin will move into its disaster recovery mode. In DR Mode, the node searches for a previous instance of the CPID. If the CPID is  found in the chain, gridcoin will validate the block within a tolerance parameter based on the historical data. In this way, Gridcoin can tolerate outages.

Anonymity and Theft of Accounts

Since some Boinc users wish to remain anonymous, Gridcoin requires no permanent unique identifier per user. Gridcoin does not transmit any sensitive unique identifier through the network. Instead, it transmits the Project CPID, a public identifier that only reveals the user credit per project. Gridcoin maintains a Skein hash algorithm to determine the origination of the owner of the CPID in a nondeterministic way. When a boinc account is stolen, the user merely needs to change the master e-mail address to regain control. The system will automatically recover. Previously mined CPID-blocks are non-deterministic and cannot be stolen from the chain to receive new credits.

Efficiency

Since Gridcoin is biased towards providing energy efficiency, a built in Skein-Groestl-Cubehash miner is provided that may solve PoB blocks up to one half of the saturation level of the daily block quantity with a prerequisite of a GPU mined Scrypt-Groestl-Cubehash block. This raises the power efficiency of the Gridcoin network by 50%.

Innovative Security Features – Advanced Encryption Standard

Gridcoin innovates with a new feature to require Skein-Groestl- Cubehash results to be encrypted with AES and tested before block solutions can be submitted. This minimizes the chance of porting the integrated miner into GPUs.

Innovative Extensions to Bitcoin

Gridcoin extends the Block storage specification to store the CPID, project name, RAC, PoB Difficulty. Gridcoin adds many new commands to the RPC console: execute, allows commands to be added without modifying the RPC protocol. For example, execute backupwallet, will backup the private keys. Listitem network will produce a list of average Boinc RAC for the entire network.