I agree with you, Mikey, about it being way to late to revert to that system. I just find it to be a better way for me to track my contribution. For example, at World Community Grid, one's contribution is tracked by Total Number of Tasks Completed, Total Amount of Run-Time, and Total Amount of Credits. I find the number of tasks and run-time to be WAY more useful to me than credits.

But that's just me. I'm happy to contribute to the science regardless of how individual contribution is being tracked, or if it's even tracked at all.

Zoltan:

Just saw you got a reply from David on the boinc_projects list. Congrats, I think. Your idea of "money as a resource" was probably novel to him, too. We definitely appreciate not just the people who voice concerns, but especially the people that voice potential solutions.

Thanks again, keep the ideas coming,
Jacob

I agree with you, Mikey, about it being way to late to revert to that system. I just find it to be a better way for me to track my contribution. For example, at World Community Grid, one's contribution is tracked by Total Number of Tasks Completed, Total Amount of Run-Time, and Total Amount of Credits. I find the number of tasks and run-time to be WAY more useful to me than credits.

But that's just me. I'm happy to contribute to the science regardless of how individual contribution is being tracked, or if it's even tracked at all.

The stats site Free-DC gives the number of units crunched per day too, but only when the project reports it in their stats. Maybe that too is something Dr A can work on, consistent stats sent out from each project. We all crunch 'workunits', if Dr A can figure out how to put that in the Server Side software then the same stats would be sent to the stats sites and a new way of looking at things could be started, with the eventual replacement of 'cobblestone totals' across projects being seen as something to crow about. ie I finished 25,403 MW funding BU units yesterday, but have no clue how many GpuGrid units I finished yesterday. I know I have 43 valid units for the 2 pc's I have attached here, but unless I go thru the list one by one have no clue how many were yesterday or the day before or the day before that, etc. GpuGrid KNOWS, it just isn't a stat they are giving out right now.

Maybe we could give out credits by number of papers published (multiply credits by impact factor and number of citations) :D
Then we would have a slightly more scientific BOINC, hehe.




ps. This is mostly a joke. I know it's probably a horrible idea due to salami publishing, impact factors being a nearly useless metric and some great science being done without publishing much.

Maybe we could give out credits by number of papers published (multiply credits by impact factor and number of citations) :D
Then we would have a slightly more scientific BOINC, hehe.

ps. This is mostly a joke. I know it's probably a horrible idea due to salami publishing, impact factors being a nearly useless metric and some great science being done without publishing much.

Yeah some projects will NEVER publish a paper so would either fade away or never even get off the ground. Rosetta for example is trying to 'find a better way' to use pc's to help scientists, or they were. There is not a lot of 'papers' going to be published in that kind of work, but the work can be helpful never the less.

Collatz is trying to prove a 'conjecture' is right or wrong, no papers will ever be published until it is 'proven' one way or the other. There are tons of other examples of 'worthwhile' Boinc projects that will never publish 'papers', those two not being evaluated for their 'scientific value' by me.

The other thing is that most projects do not document the fact that Boinc itself was used in their research, so publishing a paper and not then acknowledging Boinc means ANY paper will work for credits. I am NOT discounting your idea, I am just pointing out some things that need to be thought of before going that route.

Let's see... as of 20 July, they'd raised $1800 for various causes. They'd also awarded about 93 billion credits.

Their process is just one of giving money, but with the added catch that one must burn up electricity to make bitcoins in the process, which is bad for the environment and adds no benefit for the charitable causes involved.

The saner way to do this would be to cut out the electricity wasting, and just sell credits. 93 billion credits / $1800 = 51.67M credits per dollar. How about projects just selling me a billion credits for $20, then? It's just the same, other than wasting a bunch of electricity, isn't it? And when it comes to return on investment, I have a couple of thousand tied up in hardware, which it costs me around $20 a month to run, but which can barely break 10M a month! Why should I be a total sucker and crunch for science, when I'm only generating 300k a day, less than 0.6 cents a day worth of crunching, and I'm paying a hundred times that much just for the power?

All this is making Folding@home look awfully attractive.

Let's see... as of 20 July, they'd raised $1800 for various causes. They'd also awarded about 93 billion credits.

Their process is just one of giving money, but with the added catch that one must burn up electricity to make bitcoins in the process, which is bad for the environment and adds no benefit for the charitable causes involved.

The saner way to do this would be to cut out the electricity wasting, and just sell credits. 93 billion credits / $1800 = 51.67M credits per dollar. How about projects just selling me a billion credits for $20, then? It's just the same, other than wasting a bunch of electricity, isn't it? And when it comes to return on investment, I have a couple of thousand tied up in hardware, which it costs me around $20 a month to run, but which can barely break 10M a month! Why should I be a total sucker and crunch for science, when I'm only generating 300k a day, less than 0.6 cents a day worth of crunching, and I'm paying a hundred times that much just for the power?

And ALL we crunchers do here at GpuGrid is "burn up electricity" crunching for this project, which is also "bad for the environment and adds no benefit for the charitable causes involved". Boinc is Boinc and some projects are 'worth it' and some aren't, the key is each person gets to decide that for themselves and hopefully the not so 'worth it' ones will be weeded out. Since BU is based on asic mining, although they DO have both cpu and gpu apps too, and the credits are getting harder and harder to get as the difficulty goes up, AND there could be a limited supply of Bitcoins altogether, the whole thing may work itself out by the whole project just ending one day.

There are, or were, other projects paying exorbitant amounts of credits too, DistRTgen was one of them, people used their gpu's at it and since it also was a Boinc project it got its stats added to the totals too.

Oh and crunching the campaign #3 workunits at BU DOES help Science as it helps keep the MilkyWay Project in business. As has been discussed before credits are credits, a few billion credits and 5 bucks can get you a small coffee at StarBucks. In fact you can get the coffee with just the 5 bucks alone, as the credits are worthless. The newer campaign #4 units at BU are designed to help study "The Economic Viability of Mars Colonization", so it too could be considered a 'science project' as man is trying to travel to Mars in the not so distant future, the value of doing that traveling can be debated elsewhere though.

I think Xenu makes a very valid point (that isn't to say that I disagree with yours) and it has to do with the goal of these BOINC projects. As far as I can tell, the ideal goal of crunching for BitCoin Utopia is to raise funds for BOINC projects, but for the majority of us (if not all) it would be much more cost effective to just donate to the projects directly by cutting out the middle man project that skims a bit off the top, the hardware, internet connection, and of course electricity used which adds some varying degree of pollution to our world.

All this makes me think more so even that really most people likely just crunch for BitCoin Utopia for the credits with a few other less realistically relevant reasons added into the mix. I'm not faulting them for that, really, though it does seem a little misguided (if not hypocritical) to me. With that being said, and given that BitCoin Utopia is a BOINC project, it would seem to me that it actually would be more beneficial overall if people could just buy BOINC/project credits by donating funds directly to them. (Though of course I personally wouldn't like to see that be an option, similarly to why I don't think BitCoin Utopia should be a BOINC project in the first place.)

The goal of (in crunching for) the majority of other projects is to contribute directly to doing the fundamental computational grunt work for scientific and humanitarian endeavors, and it could conceivably be argued (though I won't attempt to do so here) that this kind of work does more good than harm in regards to pollution caused by electrical energy generation, and of course because it is actually contributing to these projects' endeavors as apposed to inefficiently funding a speculative future potential amount of work that might be done for them.

---

My BOINC Cruncher, Minecraft Multiserver, Mobile Device Mainframe, and Home Entertainment System/Workstation: http://www.overclock.net/lists/display/view/id/4678036#

I think Xenu makes a very valid point (that isn't to say that I disagree with yours) and it has to do with the goal of these BOINC projects. As far as I can tell, the ideal goal of crunching for BitCoin Utopia is to raise funds for BOINC projects, but for the majority of us (if not all) it would be much more cost effective to just donate to the projects directly by cutting out the middle man project that skims a bit off the top, the hardware, internet connection, and of course electricity used which adds some varying degree of pollution to our world.

All this makes me think more so even that really most people likely just crunch for BitCoin Utopia for the credits with a few other less realistically relevant reasons added into the mix. I'm not faulting them for that, really, though it does seem a little misguided (if not hypocritical) to me. With that being said, and given that BitCoin Utopia is a BOINC project, it would seem to me that it actually would be more beneficial overall if people could just buy BOINC/project credits by donating funds directly to them. (Though of course I personally wouldn't like to see that be an option, similarly to why I don't think BitCoin Utopia should be a BOINC project in the first place.)

The goal of (in crunching for) the majority of other projects is to contribute directly to doing the fundamental computational grunt work for scientific and humanitarian endeavors, and it could conceivably be argued (though I won't attempt to do so here) that this kind of work does more good than harm in regards to pollution caused by electrical energy generation, and of course because it is actually contributing to these projects' endeavors as apposed to inefficiently funding a speculative future potential amount of work that might be done for them.

You make some VERY good points, but it all depends on people giving up their cash to keep a project afloat, and THAT seems to be the hard part. MilkyWay is a well run project, they just lost their grant so need an influx of cash to keep running. What happens if this, or any other, Boinc project has the same thing happen? We all know how expensive and time consuming keeping pc's can be, now think about the costs of keeping a Server running that thousands of people contact on a daily basis. Most projects have a core group of supporters who will donate every time a project asks them too, but there are some people who just don't for whatever reason. BU is a way for THOSE people to contribute too, while still 'crunching' using their cpu's, gpu's or if they choose a special asic miner.

Boincstats, a Boinc stats site run by 'Willy', is the latest campaign BU is funding, one of their reps said they spend almost $3000 per month just for their internet. I can't imagine what GpuGrid, MilkyWay or some of the other Boinc projects spend per month for things, but if we users don't want ADS popping up everytime we click we must find another way to keep projects running. Even University based projects have budgets, and some have had some serious problems lately when a part failed and the University said 'there is no money in the budget for new parts'.

I am NOT saying BU is for everyone, or even most people, but if people won't donate their cash then some of the better known projects could be history in the not too distant future. Even Seti goes down every week due to budget constraints, MilkyWay says they need $40K per year to stay open. I don't know how bare bones that is, but they may find out as BU is only 1/4 the way to their goal of half of that amount.

In short SOMEONE has to pay to keep the projects running, if the grant money stops flowing and the users won't pony up some cash, then they have few options to keep running. I personally would NOT want click thru ads at every project just to read the forums, and to keep them running.

Boincstats, a Boinc stats site run by 'Willy', is the latest campaign BU is funding, one of their reps said they spend almost $3000 per month just for their internet.

A factchecker writes:

The BOINCstats donate page shows costs of €300 per month for "Server rack/bandwidth/power" - which sounds more like it. That's about 380 USD at today's exchange rate.

That was written by Willy de Zutter himself, not some un-named 'representative' - perhaps you could re-check with your source?

Having got that confusion out of the way, I fully agree that anybody who is spending significant amounts of their own money in buying or building computers purely for running BOINC should allocate a small percentage of the budget they have available for their hobby, towards meeting the server costs incurred in providing the raw materials that make it possible - i.e. data in the form of WUs.

Of course, I don't feel that people who simply use BOINC in the way it was originally designed - using spare cycles on a computer purchased and running for some other purpose - should feel under any pressure to donate.

Boincstats, a Boinc stats site run by 'Willy', is the latest campaign BU is funding, one of their reps said they spend almost $3000 per month just for their internet.

A factchecker writes:

The BOINCstats donate page shows costs of €300 per month for "Server rack/bandwidth/power" - which sounds more like it. That's about 380 USD at today's exchange rate.

That was written by Willy de Zutter himself, not some un-named 'representative' - perhaps you could re-check with your source?

Having got that confusion out of the way, I fully agree that anybody who is spending significant amounts of their own money in buying or building computers purely for running BOINC should allocate a small percentage of the budget they have available for their hobby, towards meeting the server costs incurred in providing the raw materials that make it possible - i.e. data in the form of WUs.

Of course, I don't feel that people who simply use BOINC in the way it was originally designed - using spare cycles on a computer purchased and running for some other purpose - should feel under any pressure to donate.

WHOOPS these darn fat fingers added a zero! I also 'assumed' it was dollars from the BU post, sorry on both counts!

And I do agree with you.

In short SOMEONE has to pay to keep the projects running, if the grant money stops flowing and the users won't pony up some cash, then they have few options to keep running. I personally would NOT want click thru ads at every project just to read the forums, and to keep them running.

The other issue you have with asking donors for money is not knowing if that money will actually reach intended use. Some Universities will accept that money and then maybe a very small percentage will actually make it to the project. Carl over at QCN explained to me once that efforts to get funding for them was pretty much pointless in this way. He said that it equated to maybe getting the staff beer and pizza one night because the donated funds just weren't actually divied where the donors intended. So, when volunteers are asked for donations many will ask the skeptical questions. However, at every project there is some die hard who jumps to the defense and claims how reputable such organization is and how you can fully trust them. Seriously, the people that run Universities aren't much different than other organizations. Money goes where it can grow first and foremost. As for a For Profit website for stats keeping, those issues are up to them. I do support when I can because I use their sites. However, my "donations" aren't much. I have however seen the ads. I have actually spoken with a few other projects after suggesting Milkyway to BU and Carl at QCN. POGS is one of them and are considering the opportunity. It is a pitty that it isn't better received. I also appreciate that BU has recently reduced fees a second time to 10%.

---

It's too quiet in here. We need something to get people fired up. I noticed over at BOINC the top 100 users listing. In the calculations they must be using a GFLOPS rating for bitcoin miners that seems more realistic than the crazy credits being awarded over at BU:

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/chart_list.php

Of course since bitcoin asics apparently don't do any GFLOPS at all is even that rating too high? Is the BU graph color red because it's making the BOINC devs see red? Subconscious color pick? Guess I'm bored this morning...

It's too quiet in here. We need something to get people fired up. I noticed over at BOINC the top 100 users listing. In the calculations they must be using a GFLOPS rating for bitcoin miners that seems more realistic than the crazy credits being awarded over at BU:

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/chart_list.php

Of course since bitcoin asics apparently don't do any GFLOPS at all is even that rating too high? Is the BU graph color red because it's making the BOINC devs see red? Subconscious color pick? Guess I'm bored this morning...

FIRST Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!!

Second now that BU is crunching to help Seti the 'devs' may be a bit less upset with BU, bribery always works for politicians anyway. ;-)) ACTUALLY the money is supposed to go towards the future development of Boinc, but I have heard there is no way to earmark the money in that way. Dr A is STILL investigating the credit situation, but has put out a preliminary statement that they may in fact be a bit low in the amount being awarded when compared to how the other devices, ie cpu and gpu, get awarded credits. I saw a comparison by someone who compared asic miners to a gpu as akin to a home pc compared to a super computer.

I have no idea though if an asic miner can be utilized at any other project, some folks have said emphatically NO, but others have said 'maybe'. It will be interesting if some project can and see what kind of credits they give out. Personally I HOPE they can, it would be a shame to waste all that computing power on JUST mining, no matter what credits are given out.

Thought that would fire you up ;-)

> Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!!

+1

Thought that would fire you up ;-)

> Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!!

+1

Maybe, but it is about crunching and that I can do.

Beyond wrote:

It's too quiet in here.

This thread is one of the most viewed on this forum, so people are quite interested about its topic.
I know that many readers of this topic come from other forums, and for some of them my (our) irritation prove their success.
Well, I got tired of feeding their ego by expressing my feelings and thoughts.

Beyond wrote:

We need something to get people fired up.

For what end do you want to fire people up?
To ban the BU project?
That wouldn't happen. This "battle" has been lost before this thread was started.
If I were a project which receives funding from the BU project, I would accept switching the BU project off only if someone else would provide my funding.
I think the change BU have brought is irreversible in the sense that taking it back would do more harm than it's doing now. I was worried about crunchers leaving the scientific projects for BU, but it didn't happen, at least not to that extent I was worried about. If the warnings posted in this thread had the slightest part in that, I think it's reached its goal.
That goal is making this community to see and handle this project as it is: It's fund raising not science, therefore it shouldn't be rewarded the same way as doing science is rewarded. At the moment it's the best rewarded contribution, which carries the same bad message real life does: money talks. That's not the spirit of the community I've joined 10 years ago.

Beyond wrote:

I noticed over at BOINC the top 100 users listing. In the calculations they must be using a GFLOPS rating for bitcoin miners that seems more realistic than the crazy credits being awarded over at BU:

GFLOPS and BOINC credits are basically the same thing.

Beyond wrote:

Of course since bitcoin asics apparently don't do any GFLOPS at all is even that rating too high?

There is no such exchange rate which can express the ratio between a floating point operation and a hashing operation, as these are not exchangeable at all. Besides generating crypto currencies hashing is a rare (and very simple) task for a user level application (it's used mostly for storing passwords). Its use wasn't that important to optimize CPUs or GPUs for this type of tasks. This high rewarding of hashing comes from that neither CPUs nor GPUs are made for hashing, therefore CPUs and GPUs can do hashing only in a very ineffective way, and the awarded credits reflect that even a very fast CPU (having a high FLOPS rating) can do very little hashing. Hashing can easily optimized for parallel processing; there is many dedicated hardware present in a state of the art computer which using some kind of hashing, as data storage and transmission in today's density and speed couldn't exist without different error detection and correction codes. (For example: any networking device, CD, DVD, BR discs, SSD and HDD controller chips (inside the device), cache memory inside the CPU and memory controllers for servers equipped with ECC, hardware accelerated RAID5 & RAID6 controllers.)

Beside the technological aspect of the BU phenomenon there is a more important aspect: the moral one. Truth to be told, this aspect wasn't that important to think about until BitCoin mining was done on the same devices as crunching (GPUs and CPUs), as these devices can do hashing in a very ineffective way, so the cost of crunching for scientific purposes (i.e. the cost of earning a credit) wasn't much higher than the reverse calculated price of a credit earned by donating BitCoins. When ASICs came to mining BTC, this situation has changed drastically for the worse, emerging moral questions like: "How much money does a BOINC credit worth?" or "What is more important: doing science at home, or donating 1000 USD for scientists?". Following the logic that money donations were handled separately before - that is a donor didn't receive BOINC credits for money as nobody had the authority to set the price of a BOINC credit - this reverse calculation shouldn't exist at all. However the BU and the donate@home projects did it without any authorization. Either BU miners shouldn't receive any credits for mining, as their donations should be kept in BTC, EUR, USD (just like for real money donors), or the real money donors should receive the same amount of BOINC credits for their donations. The present situation is unfair, one-sided, wrongful, biased, etc. It makes me feel like a part of a community which consists of a bunch of geeks loosing contact with reality.

If we had to set the price of a BOINC credit anyway, we should do it on moral basis, as if we leave it as it is now (on technological basis), bringing bigger or more advanced ASICs into mining will make this exchange rate worse and worse (making crunching on GPUs and CPUs even less attractive considering its costs). So we should take the average price of a credit earned through the GPU projects, and make the credits awarded by the BU project for BTC based on that average price. However that wouldn't fix the disparity between BTC donations and real money donations.

Mikey wrote:

...now that BU is crunching to help Seti the 'devs' may be a bit less upset with BU, bribery always works for politicians anyway. ;-))

This bribery works towards the miners, as they earn astronomical credits for donating a fraction of BitCoin, while real money donors don't.

Mikey wrote:

ACTUALLY the money is supposed to go towards the future development of Boinc, but I have heard there is no way to earmark the money in that way. Dr A is STILL investigating the credit situation, but has put out a preliminary statement that they may in fact be a bit low in the amount being awarded when compared to how the other devices, ie cpu and gpu, get awarded credits. I saw a comparison by someone who compared asic miners to a gpu as akin to a home pc compared to a super computer.

As I said before, the moral aspect of this is more important (in my point of view) than the technological aspect, that makes any argument based on comparing different devices based on different technologies irrelevant.

Mikey wrote:

I have no idea though if an asic miner can be utilized at any other project, some folks have said emphatically NO, but others have said 'maybe'.

ASICs are hardwired devices (this makes them that fast), in exchange they can't be reprogrammed to do different tasks. Any other project using these BTC-minig ASICs should be another BTC-minig project only.

Beyond wrote:

It's too quiet in here. This thread is one of the most viewed on this forum, so people are quite interested about its topic. We need something to get people fired up.

Retvari wrote:

For what end do you want to fire people up?

Like I said, the forum was too quiet. Thought it would be nice to get some dialogue going.

Beyond wrote:

I noticed over at BOINC the top 100 users listing. In the calculations they must be using a GFLOPS rating for bitcoin miners that seems more realistic than the crazy credits being awarded over at BU:

Retvari wrote:

GFLOPS and BOINC credits are basically the same thing.

Except that bitcoin ASICs apparently don't do any GFLOPS. If you look at what DA is awarding BU users in imitation GFLOPS, it's far different than the credits awarded at BU. So apparently he sees the BU credits as being way too high for the work done. It's interesting, that's all.

It's also obviously a moneymaking scheme as they rake a significant amount off the top. Business model: award huge BOINC credits to lure in credit greedy users and then rake off the profit. Not a bad business model if you want to make some easy bucks.

This is nice, we do have a dialogue started. What do I think about BU? I think it's fine except that the credits awarded are crazy compared to the actual work being done. What do you think about BU?

It's also obviously a moneymaking scheme as they rake a significant amount off the top.

I don't think they keep too much for themselves.

Business model: award huge BOINC credits to lure in credit greedy users and then rake off the profit. Not a bad business model if you want to make some easy bucks.

That's true, but they were lowering their percentage as more users were lured to the project. As I said before, this is a commercial project, so it's no wonder that those who run this project want to make a living from it, or at least cover their spendings on hardware.

This is nice, we do have a dialogue started. What do I think about BU? I think it's fine except that the credits awarded are crazy compared to the actual work being done. What do you think about BU?

I think that way too. But it's the simplification of the problem. The "award" for mining is BitCoin itself, it shouldn't be awarded again with BOINC credits. When a miner have some BTC, they can do anything with that BTC they want: donate it for a project, or exchange it to real world currency, and spend it, or donate the real world currency. There shouldn't be BOINC credits involved in donating money (BTC).
The exchange of BTC to real world currencies raise the question: Who pays real money for virtual money? Those who want to exchange their money anonymously. It's quite plausible that criminals are prevalent in this group of people. That would be very regrettable, if it would turn out that the most part of the money the BU project give away comes from drug dealers, illegal arms dealers, pimps, prostitution, human trafficking, illegal organ traders and terrorists - just to name a few.

It's also obviously a moneymaking scheme as they rake a significant amount off the top.

I don't think they keep too much for themselves.

Business model: award huge BOINC credits to lure in credit greedy users and then rake off the profit. Not a bad business model if you want to make some easy bucks.

That's true, but they were lowering their percentage as more users were lured to the project. As I said before, this is a commercial project, so it's no wonder that those who run this project want to make a living from it, or at least cover their spendings on hardware.

BU just reduced their 'take' from 11% to 10% and are now talking about dropping it even further to 9%. In addition they are talking about donating the portion of the 9% that is unused for BU expenses to a charity. They say NO money is being used to pay people to run and maintain BU, I have no choice but to believe them, as I have no ability to audit them, or any other project.