The Great Debate: Lifting the Gridcoin Team Requirement
In preparation for the writing of this Steemit article, I created a poll on the Gridcoin blockchain that technically runs a few more days, although I feel I have enough data at this point with 94 total voters to put this article out there.
Click here to see the current poll results.
I've been involved with Gridcoin for a couple months now with the first month mostly spent on the Gridcoin Subreddit answering questions from new GRC miners and investors, and the second month I began spending more time on the Slack channel in the hopes of contributing more to the Gridcoin project.
Up until I created my poll two weeks ago, I knew one fundamental truth: It is not a matter of IF the team requirement is lifted, but WHEN. I could point to countless Reddit posts where the concept is casually tossed around with phrases like "when the team requirement is lifted..." or "can't wait until the team requirement is lifted." Nevermind the word from long-time Gridcoin veterans stating regularly that the developers are actively working on lifting the team requirement, or that there's a sizable active developer bounty for removing the team requirement.
Can you start to figure out how a new user might assume there's no debate being had on the issue of removing the team requirement and that we're simply waiting on the development?
So as I was creating my poll, that's the lens I used. Not because I personally want the team requirement to be lifted (I do) but because I truly didn't realize there was a debate being had about it --- especially a debate on whether or not lifting the team requirement would inflate the price of GRC.
After nearly two weeks now of folks in the IRC and the Slack accusing me of malicious intent because I neglected to provide an option that allowed certain folks to strongly express their opposition to lifting the team requirement, I can finally say the timeline is winding down and the poll will be complete shortly and I have the data I was trying to get. As of right now, here are the poll results:
Purely based on the number of votes, we are split evenly between the two bookend options I provided. 28 people voted that they believe GRC is headed toward 10,000 Sats or greater, and 28 people voted that they believe lifting the team requirement will not have a material impact on the price of GRC. In discussions with some folks in the slack, there would have at least been some votes cast for an option of "Abstain" or "Lifting the team requirement will lower the price of GRC."
What would lifting the team requirement mean to a "mine and dumper?"
There are a number of miners of GRC who perform what I would call a "mine and dump" of GRC. They mine the coin every day, and once a month or so they sell their GRC on the exchanges. This type of miner is most-likely to oppose lifting the team requirement, I've learned. They don't hold a lot of GRC, so unless the price of GRC rises so high as to offset the impact of potentially thousands of new miners competing with them, lifting the team requirement could be considered a losing proposition.
Personally, I don't think lifting the team requirement has to be a negative for these folks, though. I have been a proponent of improving the DPoR reward system in conjunction with lifting the team requirement. This could allow for an automated smart-scaling of DPoR rewards, or potentially a manual (voted on with a Gridcoin blockchain poll) update to the daily DPoR rewards every quarter. If we did the latter, we could take a look at what the average miner earns in GRC and vote on an increase to help account for any inflation we're seeing in miners. I would argue lifting the team requirement and doubling or tripling the number of GRC miners would force us to act on this issue, and could be viewed as a positive thing by miners.
What will really happen to the price of GRC if the team requirement is lifted?
The common belief by people who want to see the team requirement lifted is that we would be unlocking the growth potential of Gridcoin mining, and since miners have various incentives to hold GRC (voting weight, frequency of staking, interest) we should see increased demand for GRC and thus increased price. I believe this is accurate, but I personally can't even begin to estimate what kind of impact that would be. My vote in the poll was 8,000 Sats or $0.24 USD. I don't know that I believe lifting the team requirement is going to make GRC a $1.00 USD coin, but I think the impact could be substantial.
What is the argument for why the price of GRC might be reduced if the team requirement is lifted?
Among all the people accusing me of mal-intent over the last couple weeks due to the positive nature of my poll, there was one Gridcoiner by the name of @neuralminer who was kind enough to simply offer me his perspective. NeuralMiner believes that by adding potentially thousands of pure "mine and dump" type miners who don't care about Gridcoin as a currency, we will actually increase selling pressure of the coin because these miners will be minting some of the coins that "mine and HODLers" like NeuralMiner and myself currently receive on a daily basis.
I thought that was a very intelligent point, and it is well-taken. My counter-argument.... really more of a counter-question was: for every 100 "mine and dump" type miners, how many "mine and HODL" type miners will we potentially add? How many people might we add (like myself) who will invest their own money into the coin? I don't have the answer to that question, of course, but I can say this: some of these BOINCers have a fair amount of disposable income and might be excited to invest in Gridcoin once they really learn what it is and learn more about it.
My primary contention with the team requirement issue is that it has shut us out of traditional marketing channels for BOINC users and so many of them just simply don't know what Gridcoin is. When I first started BOINC, crunching for SETI@Home I saw the Gridcoin team near 1st place, but I didn't see anybody in the message boards talking about it or endorsing it, so without even doing any research, I just assumed it was some way to earn cryptocurrency but it must not be worth doing since nobody is talking about it. It took me a couple months of people mentioning Gridcoin in the AMD Subreddit before I really gave it a hard look.
What I'm doing after the team requirement is lifted...
If you read my Advertising Gridcoin in the Post Team Requirement World post, you already know that I founded a fairly large SETI@Home team and I intend to use Gridcoin as a tool to help my team rise to the top of the BOINC ranks. This is really why I'm so confident in the prospect of lifting the team requirement. I believe team founders/admins are going to push GRC hard to their teams in order to get people who perhaps only crunch 50% of the time to instead crunch 100% of the time. I believe it will change the landscape of Gridcoin's relationship in BOINC culture and lead to new and exciting things.
My plea to people who harbor negative feelings about lifting the team requirement
SPEAK UP. Reply here, or write your own Steemit post. Perhaps the concerns you have can be addressed by people, or perhaps your concerns are completely (objectively) valid and something that we should consider as we move ever closer to making this happen. As I shared at the beginning of this post, new people coming into Gridcoin today are effectively led to believe that lifting the team requirement is a given. If you don't want that to be the narrative going forward, speak up and convince people why the team requirement shouldn't be lifted.
As @cm-steem mentions in this post I just found about lifting the team requirement, probably the main reason we're looking to lift it is because the factors that required us to have it in the beginning largely no longer exist. If there are other things we aren't thinking of, I am sure everyone would genuinely appreciate hearing them.
Thanks kids, and keep crunchin'.
Not sure I understand @neuralminer 's argument? How would mine and dump" type miners even work in GRC's scernario? Wouldn't it require them to run BOINC whitelisted projects to "mine"? And, wouldn't that be accomplishing what GRC set out to accomplish anyways: getting more people to support BOINC?
I for one would like to see the team requirements go away if the scaling issues are resolved to a reasonable level. As @dutch mentioned, being part of a team and showing your support for an organization is a big part of the BOINC experience and having to leave your team is heartbreaking.
The more users using the gridcoin client the better, even if their intent is to sell their coins we cannot & shouldn't concern ourselves with how users use their grc after earning them.
Agreed. And again, the community has the power to adapt Gridcoin as we go along. Everything doesn't have to always stay static. If we encounter an issue, we will work to fix it.
meep
I think removing the team requirement will increase the price because new users will need to purchase GRC to help them stake. If they are loyal to a team they would not want to join any of the pools.
I agree with everything you have said except for voting on changes to the DPOR reward system every quarter.
I think the reward rules should be set in stone otherwise we end up like a central bank voting on whether we should print more money or not. And who doesn't want to print more money? Everyone would vote yes and the coin would be worth less than a Zimbabwean dollar.
In my opinion the price will rise but only 0,12$ or less. I think that many mine and crunch users will join and only few mine and hold, reducing the current participation of total mine and hold users, but the price will rise anyway per old users and new investors.
Anyway, I see the team requirement a technical limitation, so it should be removed no matter the short-term price consequences. But this change should be announced for a while before applying it, because it is an important POW change so people should have time to get ready, the old users for the difficulty increase and the new users for start Gridcoin mining.
Removing the mandatory team req won't include the entire BOINC community immediately, so your mag will be the same except there will be more users joining the NN each day & mag will likely decrease due to competition.
I think what a lot of us are forgetting is why teams exist in the first place. Teams are BOINC's method, alongside project medals, to gamify the BOINC experience. This has been proven over and over in many fields to yield significant loyalty increases for any platform from its user base.
By removing the team requirement, we are thinning team loyalty. I think more crunchers will increase the GRC price, which is good for BOINC. I also think removing the team requirement is very bad for BOINC. Suddenly, a team is not as meaningful as it used to be. I also concede that the effect of this will depend a lot on the implementation of team requirement removal.
It remains to be seen which camp has the largest impact.
We're not removing teams from BOINC, just the requirement that you have to be in Team Gridcoin in order to earn GRC. After that has been changed you can be a member of any team you want.
Edit: But I have a feeling you already know that and that I'm misinterpreting :D
Ah, let me try clarify. I remember there was a discussion going around that users may be allowed to join two teams, which I would see as detrimental.
If the implementation would be to void Team Gridcoin added effect altogether, where it becomes a standard BOINC team and has nothing to do with Gridcoin reward, that would be great.
It is only a matter of time before the mandatory team req is gone, when it is we'll be able to recruit a larger userbase within the BOINC community.
That post I created was a year ago at this point, back then the support for removing the team req wasn't great but now it's looking far more likely.
Would anyone be opposed to reposting of such old posts?
I would support it 100%. I think it's important to get this issue out in front of everyone again, and give everyone the opportunity to really discuss it and disseminate all the different angles and opinions.
I'm with @Ropaga above. It's really a technical issue that we're trying to fix. I think that's a great way to frame it and similar to how you described it in your article last year.