Community post
Gridcoin Technical Whitepaper ready for Peer Review
Over the last three months I worked several evenings on the Gridcoin Technical Whitepaper. I worked mostly alone, but the result is still a community work because I sourced many pieces from all around the web:
The whitepaper was compiled with MikTex 2.9, and the result is visible here:
https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Whitepaper/blob/master/gridcoin-research-whitepaper.pdf
@thecharlatan created the Whitepaper github repository:
https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Whitepaper
There were 100 commits until now.
I sourced the structure from this anonymous Google Document:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PUmLpL3jb-Dhf9-60MPpCYpCvBukUIWeKO8Pww0bhII/edit#heading=h.1gqiga6cbzja
I took several sections from the Gridcoin Wiki for the chapter Proof of Research:
http://wiki.Gridcoin.us/Proof-of-Research
The introduction is of @jringo. Mathematical details about BOINC Recent Average Credit (RAC) are taken from this steemit article by @jefpatat:
https://steemit.com/gridcoin/@jefpatat/the-math-behind-boinc-rac
The violet pictures were done by @joshoeah and @barton26 did a grammar revision of the whole text as my mother tongue is Italian, through later I added and reworked some sections.
If you have corrections or extensions, you can either checkout the github repository and do a pull request or ask to write permission for the github repository or you can simply write in the comments below. I will implement changes evening by evening.
I heard there is a bounty pending on this task, so if this whitepaper should get the bounty I will do an effort to divide the Gridcoins among contributors/reviewers based on how critical the contribution is. If you recognize sections done by yourself let me know.
Replies (36)
The work put into this draft is amazing, however I personally think there is still a lot more to be done including several important fundamental corrections and significant cuts to content. I have no intention of pushing for a vote on this paper.
ok, no problem, let's see what others think about it and how many corrections, extensions and cuts we implement.
You've put awesome amount of work into this!
As for RAC formula, as I have already explained under @jefpatat ' s article,
Instead of an overcomplicated form:
decay = exp( (-t/7) x ln(2) )
you can use:
decay = (1/2)^(t/7)
as:
exp( (-t/th) x ln(2) ) = e^( (-t/th) x ln(2) ) = e^( ln(2^(-t/th)) ) = 2^(-t/th) = (1/2)^(t/th)
For some reason this non-simplified form of equation is copied all over Internet. Maybe because it looks more 'scientific' with exponents and logarithms than simple 1/2 to power t/th? The latter one is easier to understand and you can easy see that if t = 7 days RAC =1/2 or is halved.
thanks hotbit, i will look at it this evening and put the simplified version then
Power consumption note.
According to numbers in the whitepaper, setup i5 + gtx1060 delivers 4 895 598 GFLOPS. This would be an equivalent to 134 126 i5 processors and only 635 GPUs. As in this setup GTX delivers 98% GFLOPS, it might be more reasonable to assume that 98% of Gridcoin network GFLOPS is delivered by GPUs. Now the network would be equivalent to 1246 GTX 1060 cards and 5365 i5 processors (it comes surprisingly close to my guess-timations. With above assumptions energy usage would go substantially lower.
thank you hotbit i change it this evening, i will also reference your steemit article which is btw very interesting, maybe i'll source some sections :-)
I'd be happy to do some proofreading -- not just for grammar but also for wording and conciseness. How much time are we setting aside for community review?
change implemented, hotbit can you check it?
change implemented, now gridcoin consumes much less! the reference to your steemit article is [21]
i implemented following changes requested by @s4mmy: more page breaks and statement in chapter 4.2 about 51% attack in conflict with chapter 7.4
ciao caleb23, i would say 2-3 weeks from now on, would that be enough time for you?
I would completely remove eq. (1), as in my opinion it makes no sense here. In eq. (3) looks like only 1 is to power t/7 - some formatting needed, maybe (1/2) instead of 1/2 will help.
7 is 7 days, arbitrary chosen half life.
I have 15 nightshifts left in a row, so sadly little time to engage :(
Sure! What's the best way to send my comments? I'm not set up on Github, although if that's the best way I'm sure I can figure it out.
excuse me, i saw your post only now: i gave you write access to github (user @caleb23) github is the best way, join also teamgridcoin #whitepaper channel at https://teamgridcoin.signup.team/
today i increased bitcoin miner efficiency from 1W per gigahash/s to 0.5W per gigahash/s to make the estimate more inline with the official estimate and added a chapter on transaction efficiency as per @thecharlatan request
hey hotbit, 15 nightshifts in a row! may i ask what is your job? i implemented the brackets and th instead of 7, however i left eq. (1) just to give the info that in literature this is often seen.
@brod pointed in another post at this whitepaper:
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot17/woot17-paper-grothe.pdf
i am thinking on how to integrate it as it is well written. Fortunately the mentioned security issue was solved long ago.
today i added a reference to @brod's Gridcoin Kernel Stake v8 in the security chapter
Ok cool. I'll check it out.
Hold on. I got a little confused. I didn't have a github account to start with. I just created one (username gridcoin23). Can you give write access to that account? I plan on printing the whitepaper today and setting aside some time tonight and tomorrow to proofread. Should have suggested changes ready by then!
Just started some edits on a new branch. Hopefully those can be integrated OK.
ciao Caleb, i gave you write access to the github repository but you need to answer the invitation email
Ok awesome. I went ahead and committed my changes. I hope I did it correctly. I made some fairly substantial changes to wording in some places, so review and criticism are welcome!
@brod explained me in detail how PoS works and gave me this wiki page to know exactly what was done after the "Breaking and Fixing Gridcoin" whitepaper referenced in the previous comment: https://github.com/gridcoin/Gridcoin-Research/wiki/Stake-V8
phantastic caleb23, please also join https://teamgridcoin.signup.team/ you will receive an email that your application failed due to error, but in fact you will be able to login. Then please come to channel #whitepaper. Then a note about your change in the abstract, the style is perfect, but please also read the chapter "Gridcoin Funded Science", this is about giving Gridcoins to individual projects and is not related to Proof of research directly....
Ah ok, I didn't read that chapter yet! If you have corresponding changes in mind for the abstract, go ahead and put those in. Otherwise, I'll look at it too.
N.b. I don't want to be presumptuous in submitting my changes. I want people to feel free to reject anything I suggest. I hope at least the style and wording can be adopted in some places to improve readability.
hmm.. didn't get an e-mail. I got an error message on https://teamgridcoin.signup.team/. Any idea what might have gone wrong?
ciao @caleb23 i told you wrong: the website gives you an error message, but you should receive an email with instructions to login into http://teamgridcoin.slack.com So, please check again your email. Thanks!
Still no luck! I even tried a different e-mail and checked the spam folders.
Hmmm.. has anyone else reported issues? I suppose someone could try with a dummy e-mail address to see if the problem is with me, not the site. But anyways, I don't want to cause you too much trouble! Maybe you can just let me know if there's something else I could do to debug.
I got first a "certificate error". i added the security exception for the certificate. then i was able to submit another email and received this error message "Something went wrong and we're not quite sure what. We'll look into it as soon as possible!" however i did not receive any email. i tried to reset password for the new account, but did not receive any email. i will check with the teamgridcoin administrator then and come back to you...
I got the certificate error too. And hm ok, I was going to say sorry for the trouble, but if it's not working for anyone at all then it'll have to get fixed one way or the other! Thanks for looking into it though!
They changed the mechanism due to spambots. The new website to register is https://grcinvite.herokuapp.com/ Invitation code is GRCsquad excuse me, i had old information...
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