BOINC policy: no inclusion of virtual currencies

[Erkan-Yilmaz]

BOINC staff about this pull request:

• "Our policy is to NOT have code in the BOINC distribution that's directly related to virtual currencies."

see also:

• Project-Rain Pull-Request submitted to the BOINC GitHub Repo!

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[Erkan-Yilmaz]

Personally, I can understand both "sides" here.

As someone involved in Gridcoin I'd love it, but I also know such "flaws of BOINC" (A) that can enable people to cheat:

• cheating by BOINC admins themselves by editing the database and adding credits so they or others can get rewards in form of GRC (if you look at it less seriously you could also say that this is an "indirect donation" allowed by Gridcoin to support the project ;-) ofc, the amount of "donation" should be limited)
• hacking possibility of BOINC servers (since some BOINC admins are not well-versed in "sysadmin stuff"),
• DDOSing of BOINC servers
• cheating by BOINC users: wingman attacks, cherry picking, claiming a PFC; ... (see more)

(see also here)

And when you bring in the motivation of coins/money it can be a profitable thing for some :-(

Precautions have to be taken against such flaws FIRST, and NOT afterwards! A simple risk analysis is a good start to show you where to go to...

• and the responsibility for the precautions lies mainly on the Gridcoin side, b/c it tries to reward based on data BOINC provides (ofc BOINC also should want to protect its users' data: email, IP, ...)

(A) originally, BOINC just gives points, so I can imagine that even if it is known to be cheatable, people might think: "it's just virtual points, so what?"

[Erkan-Yilmaz]

see also here:

• "We won't get exposure nor endorsement from SETI nor majority of BOINC projects, that was made clear during the 2017 BOINC workshop." (BOINC workshop was: Sep 6-8)
• "There's an outright rule against including cryptocoin/virtualcurrency code within the BOINC codebase, which sucks. Some perceive us as wanting to 'get rich quick', others simply cannot endorse due to regulations/complexities of their scientific institutions."

and more comments in that thread