What is BOINC?
BOINC is an open-source volunteer oriented computing grid that combines the processing power of all individual users for the purposes of scientific research. It's free, and harnesses the unused clock cycles from processors and graphics cards to attempt to cure cancer/aids/ebola/malaria, map the milkyway, crack enigma codes, etc..
What are some examples of existing BOINC projects?
World Community Grid : Attempting to solve Cancer, Ebola, Malaria, Zika, etc
SETI@Home : Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)
GPUGRID : Full-atom molecular simulations of proteins
Asteroids@home : Asteroid research - it uses photometric measurements of asteroids observed by professional big all-sky surveys as well as 'backyard' astronomers. The data is processed using the lightcurve inversion method and a 3D shape model of an asteroid together with the rotation period and the direction of the spin axis are derived.
Milkyway@home : Creation of a 3d map of the milkyway galaxy using data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This project enables research in both astroinformatics and computer science.
vLHCathome : Full-fledged LHC event physics simulations
Rosetta@Home : Protein structure prediction that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases. Disease Related Research
Cosmology@Home : Darkmatter/Universe Model Research
Who can make a BOINC project?
Anyone can create a BOINC project, there's no centralised authority that you are required to consult before creating a BOINC project.
If you've got a good idea for a project navigate to the BOINC project brainstorming steem thread for tips regarding setting up the project & how you can continuously reward your userbase Gridcoin at no cost.
How can I tip an BOINC user my crypto-asset of choice?
The cryptocurrency Gridcoin has for several months had the capability to 'project rain' (tip) GRC to users within team Gridcoin. We have used this functionality to tip our users during inter-team BOINC competitions in order to drive our leaderboard position higher.
The same concept of 'project rain' can be applied to any crypto-asset as long as you have the ability to securely match each target BOINC user's CPID to their Bitshares/Steem/(other) account/address.
"CPID" stands for Cross-project identifier; think of it as an identity shared amongst all BOINC projects. We would use this CPID to query BOINC projects that each BOINC user is crunching then use the retrieved statistics to determine appropriate allocations of the asset being distributed.
Once asset allocations have been determined, you would then need to generate a raw transaction to distribute your asset to several thousand users in the one transaction.
Assets could be distributed based on RAC (Recent average credit) or Total RAC (Historical contributions) on an individual project basis (hand-pick projects).
In order to match user's CPID to crypto accounts/addresses, a BOINC project would need setup that provides additional crypto account/address fields. This is where the largest amount of work resides and why I am gauging interest in the idea prior to dedicating my time to its development.
What is the potential scale of the target tipping audience?
Currently, there are approximately 4 million total BOINC users, and 424.5k active BOINC users.
Whilst it's unlikely that all 424.5k active BOINC users will join the tipping BOINC project (required to match cpid:addresses), there exists the massive potential to exceed the total participation of the Auroracoin airdrop (43054) without involving showing proof of identity nor involving user's cryptocurrency private keys.
This could prove to be a great method of regularly distributing new crypto-assets & recruiting new users to your cryptocurrency platform of choice.
Thoughts?
So, what are your thoughts on this idea? Interested?
Best regards,
CM.
