[ANN] the ScienceCoin Project - Initial Planning Phase.

[Joe_Bauers]

I've started the initial stages of ScienceCoin and am looking for your help to positively change the world!  

https://github.com/sciencecoin/sciencecoin

ScienceCoin

~
The ScienceCoin Project - A Distributed Computing Alt Coin With A Purpose

http://www.sciencecoin.org

Copyright (c) 2013 ScienceCoin Developers

~
What is ScienceCoin?

The intent of the ScienceCoin project is to create a distributed computing alt coin with a purpose. As of May, 2013 - there have been many "different" Bitcoin clones/alt-coins released, and while some of them have been true forks from Bitcoin and appear to be beneficial to the community, most are now being released with one or two edits to the Bitcoin code with the assumed intent of:

1) Releasing them as soon as possible, and with the least amount of effort.

2) Pre-mining them, and using the resulting hoard of coins as trading avenues for Bitcoin, and other true alt-coins.

The aim of the ScienceCoin project is different. As thus, there will be much work required before ScienceCoin can be released.

ScienceCoin will be 100% free and open source and will follow all applicable guidelines established (as of 5/3/2013)

[here] http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines

and

[here] http://opensource.org/docs/osd

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Initial ScienceCoin Project Goals:

1) By helping to further Science (knowledge), the main goal of ScienceCoin is simply to better the world!

2) ScienceCoin will use the exceptional processing power and "always on" benefits of alt-coin mining to provide distributed computing solutions to Universities and *reputable scientific research facilities across the world.
_{Reputable == Should be determined by the ScienceCoin community.}

3) ScienceCoin will be directly tied to the value of Bitcoin. The ScienceCoin client will be created to devote 1/4 of the hosts processing power toward generating ScienceCoins and 3/4 will be reserved for distributed computing processes on the network.
[* A valid case has been made to change this to 100% of the processing power - and use a different logic to provide a reward to miners - perhaps a system similar to PPC. ]
The value of 1 ScienceCoin should be the equal to 0.02 Bitcoins and will be generated every 12 hours. The number of ScienceCoins generated every 12 hours will be determined by the amount of Bitcoins that would be generated by the hashing power (1/4) of the ScienceCoin network at that time vs. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Generation_Calculator. The value of ScienceCoin will be in its rarity!

4) Mining incentive. Apart from generating ScienceCoins, miners will also receive 95% percent of the Bitcoin fees that are paid to the network for distributed computing rental periods. The other 5% will be reserved for paying developers, to provide discounts to nonprofit organizations, other initiatives required to better ScienceCoin.

5) ScienceCoin should be run as a P2P client, modified/optimized to allow for seamless distributed computing.

6) ScienceCoin should have special value to Universities. The cost of renting the network should be [TBD] % less when using ScienceCoin. This should give Universities an incentive to accept ScienceCoin for things like books, supplies, even tuition. A miner with enough ScienceCoins could pay for their entire education!

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Possible additional features:

1) Require all clients to utilize Tor. (This could also fork to a separate project, e.g. TorCoin.) While it's often noted how much hashing power the Bitcoin network provides, one of the other potential benefits that is often overlooked is the "always on and connected to the network" requirement in order to mine in any fashion. By playing to this benefit, ScienceCoin could require all clients to connect through Tor and while doing so, also increase the overall security, strength and speed of Tor.

[achillez]

I was thinking the exact same thing last night. This is a ***GREAT*** idea.

[jimhsu]

Great, couple of comments:

http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines

Free (as in speech) software is good.

*Reputable == Does not harm animals in any way.

Should be more clearly stated as institutions with IRBs and animal protocol review boards. Many procedures can potentially cause animal harm, but only if said harm is justified, limited, and there are no other alternatives.

The value of 1 ScienceCoin should be the equal to 0.02 Bitcoins and will be generated every 12 hours.

How do you plan to enforce this value? Are you reading in market values?

The cost of renting the network should be [TBD] % less when using ScienceCoin.

Obviously requires some authentication scheme. Who will administer it?

[JohnDorien]

1. What organisations do you like to support most? please list some. I like the overall idea but don't want to support US foundations only

2. will there be a link to all the projects the hashing power is provided to? How will this be handled for US black listed states which could also have good science institutions?

3. As already asked how will that payment shares be valued unless there's a central DB?

[rbdrbd]

Overall, the idea of having coins that actually help humanity when they are mined is excellent. Few questions though:

1. So if I read that correctly, you're tying the value of ScienceCoin, along with the amount created, to BitCoin? Why not only tie the amount created to BitCoin and have the value float independently? You will have many miners that want to mine for the good of the project, but still many more are more profit-motivated. I see a rising/fluctuating value as a strong incentive for this latter group of miners to move their processing power over to ScienceCoin, over other AltCoins. Otherwise, if I was profit-motivated, why would I mine ScienceCoin, if I am only using 1/4 of my horsepower that I would be using for BitCoin?

2. Will this share the Bitcoin block chain (i.e. merged mined)? Is that even possible, since having 1/4 of the processing power only put towards generating new coins while the other fraction goes towards scientific computing?

3. What's to stop me (or anyone else) from ripping out the scientific computational requirement and dedicating 100% of my computing power to generating ScienceCoins? Do you have some kind of plan in place to prevent this kind of reverse engineering?

[rayman]

The value of 1 ScienceCoin should be the equal to 0.02 Bitcoins

The only way I see it work is if you guarantee the price by buying any amount at this price.

But why to complicate it throught a coin and waste those 25% you are referring? Why not just start a service that pays in bitcoins for computation power? The only thing you would have to do is find how many BTC to pay to attract masses...

[rbdrbd]

The value of 1 ScienceCoin should be the equal to 0.02 Bitcoins

The only way I see it work is if you guarantee the price by buying any amount at this price.

But why to complicate it throught a coin and waste those 25% you are referring? Why not just start a service that pays in bitcoins for computation power? The only thing you would have to do is find how many BTC to pay to attract masses...

That's an interesting idea...attract $ from institutions to have the mining pool run their experiments. Take the $, convert to bitcoins, for awarding to the miners. However, the volatile nature of BitCoin means that the cost of running given computations can fluctuate wildly, unless you buy big lots up front and lock in your prices.

I can also see the US govt being a big fan of this for their own publicly funded experiments...NOT

[JohnDorien]

The value of 1 ScienceCoin should be the equal to 0.02 Bitcoins

The only way I see it work is if you guarantee the price by buying any amount at this price.

But why to complicate it throught a coin and waste those 25% you are referring? Why not just start a service that pays in bitcoins for computation power? The only thing you would have to do is find how many BTC to pay to attract masses...

That's an interesting idea...attract $ from institutions to have the mining pool run their experiments. Take the $, convert to bitcoins, for awarding to the miners. However, the volatile nature of BitCoin means that the cost of running given computations can fluctuate wildly, unless you buy big lots up front and lock in your prices.

I can also see the US govt being a big fan of this for their own publicly funded experiments...NOT

the idae is good and - sry US guys - f*ck the Us gov and start it in any other country of the world not hanging on the president's nipples. I rly think this might work way better than the "alien code" project (forgot the name) and all the other stuff around if users get paid just slightly better than they would putting all their mining power into some XXX Coin pool

[psybits]

Excellent so exciting that someone has made this happen. Props to the OP!

[furuknap]

Watching, the idea sounds good. Not sure I agree with the political aspects of it, but watching still.

[markm]

Why not just start a service that pays in bitcoins for computation power?

+1

Because as always all the rhetoric all the blah blah blah rationalisations / justifications are all about rationalising / justifying launching yet another scamcoin.

If the real intent was to provide computing to scientists then obviously simply paying bitcoins or any other existing currency is the way to go.

But going that way doesn't involve the real goal, which is the yet another scamcoin pump and dump.

Miners are already always-on, they already value some coin or other or some fiat or other, so simply offering them good pay in whatever kind of coin or fiat they like is the appropriate way of approaching them about renting their computing-capacity.

All the rest is just scamcoin-addiction/mania poisoning an otherwise at least superficially commendable idea/goal/purpose by trying to shoehorn a scamcoin into any pretend purpose one can dream up that folks might consider commendable.

-MarkM-

[phrozenspite]

might want to talk to some of the guys in our thread here, they might be very interested in this project https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=193084.0

[markm]

Also, simply by adding the requirement that all data and results be free open source data and results would make DeVCoin applicable, since funding free open source pure research is probably exactly the kind of thing that DeVCoin is for.

-MarkM-

[Stark-Fujikawa]

Whether this coin will actually be one to benefit researchers like applications as Folding@Home have done remains to be seen. But there's huge potential for something like it out there to vastly contribute with all the hashing power out there today. I hope it arrives sooner rather than later as it is something we could all benefit from in the long run.

[Joe_Bauers]

Why not just start a service that pays in bitcoins for computation power?

+1

That's certainly an option. I suppose if the network was big enough the mining profit could be almost in line with what would be made mining Bitcoins. The point is to give miners the incentive to devote computing power to this project.

What organisations do you like to support most? please list some. I like the overall idea but don't want to support US foundations only

The client should be setup so that this could be determined by the miners.
    

[Joe_Bauers]

Why not just start a service that pays in bitcoins for computation power?

+1

Because as always all the rhetoric all the blah blah blah rationalisations / justifications are all about rationalising / justifying launching yet another scamcoin.

If the real intent was to provide computing to scientists then obviously simply paying bitcoins or any other existing currency is the way to go.

But going that way doesn't involve the real goal, which is the yet another scamcoin pump and dump.

Miners are already always-on, they already value some coin or other or some fiat or other, so simply offering them good pay in whatever kind of coin or fiat they like is the appropriate way of approaching them about renting their computing-capacity.

All the rest is just scamcoin-addiction/mania poisoning an otherwise at least superficially commendable idea/goal/purpose by trying to shoehorn a scamcoin into any pretend purpose one can dream up that folks might consider commendable.

-MarkM-

The intent of the ScienceCoin project is to create a distributed computing alt coin with a purpose. As of May, 2013 - there have been many "different" Bitcoin clones/alt-coins released, and while some of them have been true forks from Bitcoin and appear to be beneficial to the community, most are now being released with one or two edits to the Bitcoin code with the assumed intent of:

1) Releasing them as soon as possible, and with the least amount of effort.

2) Pre-mining them, and using the resulting hoard of coins as trading avenues for Bitcoin, and other true alt-coins.

The aim of the ScienceCoin project is different. As thus, there will be much work required before ScienceCoin can be released.

Not sure how we're not looking for the same thing... 

[psybits]

Also, simply by adding the requirement that all data and results be free open source data and results would make DeVCoin applicable, since funding free open source pure research is probably exactly the kind of thing that DeVCoin is for.

-MarkM-

+1 to this  

You can see an intro to DeVCoin here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=34586.0

OP Please PM me if you would like to discuss further

[markm]

We are not looking for the same thing because you are looking to launch yet another coin while pretending to actually be looking to deploy scientific-computing or to create an interface of some kind between scientists looking for computing and people who own computing equipment.

The whole concept of creating some new coin is a pointless diversion from either of the supposedly actual goals.

The first goal, that of deploying computing equipment, is redundant to the extent that equipment capable of the required computing already exists, if the second goal, that of putting scientists in need of computing in touch with people who have equipment capable of doing the desired computing, is accomplished.

Miners might not even be the best equipped for much of scientific computing; you might notice that most supercomputing GPU farms use nVidia GPUs rather than AMD/ATI GPUs. AMD is great for miners because SHA256 hashing only needs integers. nVidia is preferred by supercomputing-using-GPU farms for its apprently better abillity to work with floating-point values, isn't it?

So for starters, miners are not even all that well equipped for a lot of scientific computing.

So the whole coin idea actually works against the whole scientific computing idea as it likely would use either a coin that is better mined with integer computing like current coins or a coin optimised for the nVidia style of GPUs, in either case introducing a confounding bias toward integer or floating point operations.

Simply creating some kind of "we find the kind of computing you need for you and negitiate best price for it for you" service would be more generally applicable to the purported goal of making available to science computing capability applicable to its needs, as any type of computing that can be bought with any kind of money could be obtained for scientists, not just whatever kind of computing your new scamcoin needs for mining itself.

-MarkM-

[psybits]

Why not just start a service that pays in bitcoins for computation power?

+1

Because as always all the rhetoric all the blah blah blah rationalisations / justifications are all about rationalising / justifying launching yet another scamcoin.

If the real intent was to provide computing to scientists then obviously simply paying bitcoins or any other existing currency is the way to go.

But going that way doesn't involve the real goal, which is the yet another scamcoin pump and dump.

Miners are already always-on, they already value some coin or other or some fiat or other, so simply offering them good pay in whatever kind of coin or fiat they like is the appropriate way of approaching them about renting their computing-capacity.

All the rest is just scamcoin-addiction/mania poisoning an otherwise at least superficially commendable idea/goal/purpose by trying to shoehorn a scamcoin into any pretend purpose one can dream up that folks might consider commendable.

-MarkM-

I see where you're coming from Mark, but the coins which have a large miner base do seem to do very well - so I don't see why an ethical project also geared at attracting a large miner base cannot be a successful and ethical project.

EDIT: Looks like we replied at the same time. Ha ha.

[Joe_Bauers]

Mark - I don't blame you for assuming that every new coin is a "scamcoin". Why don't you become a part of this project and be my *conscience 

*On a side note ConScienceCoin is what I would call it if I was looking to create a scamcoin.

As for nVidia being the preferred platform for HPDC, this would certainly give those GeForce folks who have been mostly sitting on the sidelines a chance to play a major role in this project along with Radeons and Procs.