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Thread: PrimeGrid News

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    PrimeGrid News

    New PrimeGrid Policy - Monetization of BOINC credit
    PrimeGrid has decided not to participate in any system that monetizes our BOINC credit. For more details please see http://www.primegrid.com/forum_thread.php?id=8272.

    More...

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    This raises a few questions. They mention collatz in the discussion at the PG forum in the discussion on monetization of boinc credit, what happened at collatz? I'm assuming by monetization it is inferred through the mining such as gridcoin and such? I'm curious as to what started this issue. I understand primegrid's concerns regarding the possible motivation for some individuals to possibly "enhance" their scores. When they mention boinc projects, which ones besides primegrid are against the monetization? Does this monetization infer that others are making money off the donated crunching time and efforts of the bulk of volunteer crunchers???

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    Under the primegrid news folder under the monetization of boinc credit there are some new comments concerning the issue at collatz. Also there is a new comment concerning Charity Engine. This is all interesting reading. Our long time effort of volunteer crunching for various projects has apparently entered into a new reality with conflicting interests other than the "scientific" interests that were behind so many of us getting involved in this hobby years ago. Sad to see.

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    Apparently there were also some attempts to cheat at SRBase, according to that same thread at the PG forum.
    Re Collatz, I believe someone modified some results so it appeared they were processing MUCH faster. By being greedy in their cheating it stood out and got noticed. Had they been subtle they would've gotten away with it. The Collatz admin had to shut down the project and write better code and fix the cheating results. It all happened a while back.

    I posted in the PrimeGrid forum that I disliked "the Borg" team aka Gridcoin from overtaking projects; I listed a few examples where they just make competition impossible. It is mainly a problem when they pool many user accounts and thus their hardware together so it appears to be one "user" in the statistics but is actually a lot of people. I was feeling bad that day and felt like giving up DC'ing as its just so expensive as a hobby and 10+ years of crunching gets overrun in days by Gridcoin. I got taken to task by Azmodes (who was with Gridcoin then) who responded along the lines of - just cuz you can't compete there is no need to stop DC'ing.

    When Michael posted the thread about the decision to de-whitelist Gridcoin from running Primegrid I posted "we crunch for primes not dimes" to which Michael replied he liked how I distilled the discussion into a few words.

    It is interesting that in the original poll thread (since closed) I was one of the few voices that spoke against the Gridcoin team being included. Then when the PG Admins decided to exclude Gridcoin the majority of people came out in favor of the decision.

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    Yup, I know what you mean insofaras getting fed up and thinking of quitting crunching. It gets rather discouraging at times. The effort is to find primes. Points really don't have anything to do with that. However they do have a use for teams and folks competing against one another. Without that friendly competition the whole distributed computing thing wouldn't have taken off like it has. However as you point out it is getting more expensive all the time. Then the mining thing came along and really changed the game. Now we have jerk writing code to take over other folks computer to mine, and then the mining addicts wonder why others don't want to have anything to do with the mining assets on boinc science and math projects. I'm glad PG is against the monetizing thing. It would be nice to know any other projects that are not supporting it also. Been crunching since the early times, but this monetizing and greed thing has me seriously thinking of hanging it up as this just isn't a fun thing now like it used to be. Specially for those of us running only our own personal equipment. The sad thing is that the mining diehards are giving the PG admins grief over their decision. The Borg is a good name for it! :-)

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    Seems like history repeats itself in this subject... remember Gridfinity?

    http://www.amdusers.com/forum/showth...paid-to-crunch

    I couldn't join it back then either, as I wrote, it felt "unnatural" getting paid to crunch. Here's my quote on it on a thread about 11 years ago:
    Quote Originally Posted by NeoGen View Post
    I don't think I'll crunch for this even if it works someday and is legit...

    To me it feels unnatural... the concept of distributed computing started with scientists/mathematicians/investigators that had very complex problems and few resources and reached out to the public to volunteer to help them.

    I hope this concept doesn't pick up or someday we'll refer to projects as paying, and non-paying... as we do nowadays for Boinc and non-boinc... can you imagine that? Even worse... all projects would have to have financial backing and/or commercial purpose or they wouldn't survive... Capitalism at its best?

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    I don't know... Maybe the time has come for different classes of crunchers in the stats, ie: private person using only personally owned equipment, people with permission to utilize corporate equipment, and crypto mining teams for instance. As it is now it just isn't a fun thing anymore and I'm really thinking about just moving on as it is an expensive hobby nowdays. A lot of folks have moved on, crunching teams now are just shells of what they used to be.

    edit: After posting this, went to the PG site and there's a long winded post on the monetization thread over the decision. Really hate to see what this has all come down to after years of prime searching on multiple projects. Just going to vote with my feet for the betterment of my wallet. It used to be really fun, but the old days are now the future past.
    Last edited by Brucifer; 11-20-2018 at 07:06 AM.

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    I'll keep running it for free probably until the last non-paid project dies

    Time brings about a change, but that doesn't mean we have to abandon it because we don't like it. Maybe we just have to re-invent ourselves in a different way to stay competitive.
    I've wondered a few times in my mind the idea of "what if AMD Users ran as a collective too?".
    Imagine this... say our Team has for example 3000 CPUs and 500 GPUs across the globe. (I'm throwing out random numbers). And say there's a software similar to a Boinc Account Manager that allows us all to pool our individual machines into a mega "AMD Users Borg" account under the management of our admins Vaughan, AMDave, and others. The downside to it is that we would lose our individuality in the stats for the most part, unless we have a way to track and sum the contributions of each users machines inside the borg. (functionality of my imaginary account manager software). And we also give up control to the borg and the collective's majority objectives.

    The weight of the individuality factor will vary from person to person, but for example myself, I love seeing myself on the stats and all that, but I acknowledge that my compute capacity is so low that I'm no match for almost anybody, so it would actually delight me to see the raw power of the AMD Borg focused on a small number of rotating targets (could be a monthly rotation of a handful of projects upon voting for example) than all of us scattered across a hundred different projects and making little headway in almost any. My individuality factor is small so I would gladly plug my few machines to a higher AMD Borg and entrust what little I have to the capable hands of the collective and our admins. Other individuals may have so much computing power alone they are nearly a borg on their own so they have a higher individuality factor and would not prefer to disappear within the collective. It would end up being a personal choice.

    I guess it's been a constant throughout distributed computing history, we always pool together in bigger and bigger numbers to fight other equally large number threats. In the beginning there was only individuals, then individuals pooled together and formed teams, then bigger aggregates came along like organizations and then even entire countries as we see on the stats breakdowns... I guess the next step will be the big supercomputing borgs?


    Thoughts?

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    Interesting views and reading. At the central point of it all though is the availability of peso's to pay for the equipment and electricity. And due to the mining thing the cost of gpu's went through the roof. The huge demand isn't there like it was before but the gpu manufacturers are still wanting a pretty penny for the cards. And the price of power continues to increase. Sadly, income doesn't increase at the same as the annual inflationary rate. So in my retired old man world, I sink a little lower every year in my discretionary spending amount. I personally would not care to see things evolve into a team borg account. It has been tried to some degree in various teams with members contributing funds to purchase and operate team crunchers, with varying degrees of success. A problem is that if the members aren't "playing" with their equipment, then their interest and physical participation begin to wane, and at some point they just fade off into the sunset..... at least under the presently available software. The software needs to evolve with the "growth" of the crunching world. And as you and some others have pointed out, boinc doesn't presently do that and like it or not, the mining/keychain entering the scene has highlighted some shortcomings in the present state of affairs. Whether boinc will end up being modified, or some other software is produced by others is yet to be seen. The borg has a lot of power that could do some good, however their ability to crush any other teams out there has soured a nu mber of non-borg crunchers. The issue really boils down in my opinion as to whether the shakers and movers on each side of the fence can get together and figure out a way to keep the majority of participants happy.

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