What is BOINC?

BOINC lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer. The BOINC app, running on your computer, downloads scientific computing jobs and runs them invisibly in the background. It's easy and safe. About 30 science projects use BOINC. They investigate diseases, study climate change, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research. The BOINC and Science United projects are located at the University of California, Berkeley and are supported by the National Science Foundation.

Why use Gridcoin?

There are several other currencies that we could have chosen for cruncher payments. US Dollars or Euros or even Bitcoin on the Lightning Network could be used as efficient transaction mediums, but confer no specific advantages other than broad familiarity. The Gollem Project (using an ERC-20 based token on the Ethereum blockchain) bares many similarities to Gridcoin, but is still in very early stages of development, thus the Gollem software for coordinating compute grids is incomplete for our needs. In comparison, BOINC is a stable software project with over 20 years of active development and proven performance. Grid Labs has chosen to build our business around the Gridcoin currency and Open Economic Network for several reasons. First and most importantly, using the GRC currency supports the Gridcoin blockchain which supports the brilliant scientists on whom businesses like Grid Labs depend for continued exploration of our universe. Second, renting computing power on the Gridcoin network is currently several orders of magnitude more cost-effective than an equivalent amount of power through standard cloud providers. We believe this presents a not insignificant market opportunity for certain specific applications. Third, the Gridcoin network already boasts thousands of crunchers and roughly 8 Peta FLOPS of computing power. The OEN, blockchain software, and network computing power is in an early but maturing stage.

Why use BOINC?

We chose BOINC primarily to simplify setup for prospective crunchers and our initial implementation. It is important to us that cruncher's computational power can flow easily between our projects and other Whitlisted BOINC projects (see "How will you protect the science?" below). Importantly however, Gridcoin as a network is not inseperable from BOINC and we do anticipate moving to a more modern infrastructure in the future such as Kubernetes.

I like your pitch. Can I invest?

The short answer is no, Grid Labs is not seeking any outside investment at this time. Grid Labs is an extraordinarily experimental project aimed at testing two things. First, whether a profitable business can be run using the Gridcoin network. Second, whether the addition of for-profit projects to the Gridcoin network proves to be a net benefit to the scientific projects that already depend on it. Grid Labs will only continue if both those conditions are met. We require an agile, capital efficient structure free of fiduciary responsibilities to outside investors in order to carefully evaluate the second condition.

This being said, if you have significant capital and want to invest in this ecosystem you might consider integrating Gridcoin into your existing business (or start a new business using our code), or buy and stake GRC.

Can I donate to Grid Labs?

Certainly, if you really love the project and want it to take off you may donate GRC to the following Gridcoin address:

SMBKzkNysrYxwdxMkzEy3ScJ65qfTrCCKC

All donated GRC will be used to directly pay crunchers. We don't sell GRC. Notably, you cannot get a tax deduction for donating to Grid Labs as we are structured as a for-profit LLC. While our stated purpose is to support science research efforts, our experimental setup requires us to test whether a for-profit business can be run on the Gridcoin network. If you would like to donate GRC for a tax deduction we encourage you to consider the newly formed Gridcoin 501c3.

Is your technology open source?

Not just our software, but our entire strategy and business model is open source. We welcome other innovative businesses and entrepreneurs to copy what we've done here and improve on it.

How can you afford to open source your business strategy?

We have identified a business strategy that is mutually beneficial to Grid Labs, Gridcoin, and other "competing" businesses. Because a significant percentage of our (albeit small) cash reserves are held in GRC, the success of Grid Labs is closely tied to the adoption and sustainable success of Gridcoin. Game theoretically, this creates a positive-sum network effect between all participants. We hope to be the first of many similar businesses that will push the envelope of what can be achieved with the Gridcoin Open Economic Network.

What if Grid Labs pulls too many crunchers away from Whitelisted BOINC projects? How will you protect the science?

This is an important concern which deserves a thorough answer. At the outset, it is important to note that we are maintaining a small, privately owned business structure. The partners of Grid Labs have complete control over the company and do not have any feduciary responsibility to outside parties. Should Grid Labs ever succeed and grow beyond this structure, we will pursue registering as a B-Corporation, so that the protection of Whitelist Project's computational power takes precedence over any short term profit seeking interests. Additionally, we have setup a public dashboard which (roughly) tracks the computational power on Whitelisted projects. Grid Labs and members of the Gridcoin community can use this to audit our efforts in this matter.

There are several other reasons why we do not think this will ultimately be a significant problem. First, as a for-profit entity we have a vested interest in paying as little of our GRC as possible to meet our computational needs. Second, approximately two-thirds of BOINC's total power comes from participants who have no interest in Gridcoin, and the vast majority of Gridcoin participants would continue to support BOINC science whether or not GRC existed. Consequently, we anticipate most of Grid Lab's computation to come from new Gridcoin participants (possibly as an alternative to pool-crunching for those with low GRC wallet balances) or from current participants who spin up new hardware to supplement their Whitelist work. Finally, it is worth noting that work units from Whitelisted scientific research are themselves a limited resource. Several BOINC projects have been Greylisted or removed from Gridcoin altogether after failing to supply enough work units feed the demand from crunchers. Grid Labs exists as an economically parallel entity, distinct from Gridcoin's Whitelist system. This should allow us to responsively throttle our utilization and act as a buffer for the ecosystem's work unit distribution, ultimately benefitting researchers.