"Charity Engine" ControversysteemCreated with Sketch.

in #gridcoin7 years ago (edited)


There has been a lot of discussion in the last couple of days regarding Charity Engine after this post by @dutch

https://steemit.com/gridcoin/@dutch/exposing-the-pomegranate-botnet

I've previously commented on that post and it raised some concerns with me, however I have been doing some digging and so thought I should post my own thoughts on the matter.

What are the facts?

  1. Charity Engine is a for profit business registered under the name "THE WORLDWIDE COMPUTER COMPANY LIMITED" in the UK
    Company Details: link
    Accounts: link

  2. Charity Engine utilises an old modified Boinc client, it is not clear if the version used is 7.0.80 or 7.0.76

  3. Users of Charity Engine run both regular BOINC work and commercial work that Charity Engine are paid to process, Charity Engine has also experimented with mining cryptocurrencies using their client.

  4. Charity Engine claim to pay users 33% of profits in the form of a prize draw, 33% to charities and they keep 33% for themselves. Also bare in mind that this is out of profits, any wages/dividends/loans/shares etc the company issues come out before profit.

  5. During 2017, Charity Engine has paid out a $1000 prize to users on average every 3-4 months and has paid out $4000 this year in total according to their website.
    https://www.charityengine.com/news

  6. There is no record of what charitable donations have been made as this information hasn't been released however there is evidence of a $3000 donation to Oxfam here
    https://www.oxfam.org.uk/get-involved/fundraising/supporter-stars/fundraising-blog/2017/04/charity-engine

  7. Charity Engine has been collecting Gridcoin during this year for the Boinc computations their users have completed using the name "Pomegranate"

  8. The Pomegranate user is currently earning $6000 per month @ current GRC prices ($0.05/GRC). At earlier lower prices of $0.02-0.03/GRC Pomegranate would be earning $2400 - $3600 per month

Conclusions

Is Charity Engine Malware?

In my opinion there is no clear evidence that Charity Engine is any kind of Malware or Botnet. However...

There is some evidence that Charity Engine deploys it's software through dubious yet legal methods such as bundling. This type of "marketing" prays on those that are not computer savvy and generally these users will not know they are running the software.

This opinion is based upon the complete lack of any community discussion or user activity around the internet despite a claimed number of downloads in the millions and number of enrolled computers in the hundreds of thousands. It would be extremely unusual for there to be no discussion around Charity Engine when it is claimed to be much larger than Boinc itself.

If more evidence surfaces, I reserve the right to alter this opinion.

Is Charity Engine worth using?

In my opinion no and I would encourage other people to avoid it for the following reasons.

  1. It is not clear if Charity Engine meet their claimed commitments to charities and users as they are not open about their accounts.
    • The company does give some profits to charities and users, the amount however is a matter of trust.
  2. The abbreviated unaudited accounts for the company for 2016 show that the company technically makes a loss year on year thanks to some creative accounting.
    • This means they could decide not to pay anything to charities or users and still be honest, this in my opinion is intentionally misleading.
    • The company has negligible assets, everything is tied up with "Creditors" presumably as a tax avoidance (legal) strategy

With these points in mind it is my opinion that Charity Engine is not an ethical company and is syphoning cash from users and charities for their own benefit, however what they do appears to remain legal.

It could be argued that it once had its day but with blockchain technology and its trustless decentralised model it is much better for both users and charities to run Boinc directly and claim Gridcoin for themselves or through the GRCPool. GRCPool only takes a nominal fee as operating costs (and in my opinion shows how inflated Charity Engines costs are)

Users can then donate as much as they want to charities of their choice cutting out the middle man.


Thanks for taking the time to read my ramblings. If you have found this post useful please consider upvoting, resteeming and/or following me.

Gridcoin: Rx5iQUC9fdZkYuxrjW6ySV6Jfttsw5Ub2L
Bitshares: g-uk https://wallet.bitshares.org/?r=g-uk
Ethereum: 0x734E41c433DE29383957A80dc57B8D025dd326b5


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This may interest you regarding the no evidence part.

There is no creative accounting, nor tax avoidance. We have creditors because we took on seed investment and loans to exist. This is totally normal for a tech startup.

It's also quite normal for a startup to make no profits for its first few years. Indeed, it's normal for most startups to fail.

When we began, nobody got paid. I was on zero wages for the first two years and less than minimum wage for the next three. This has been a very hard and unrewarding mission: to bring millions of completely non-techie users to BOINC, by incentivising them with other means (supporting charity and the prizes). It has also meant finding paying customers to keep the whole thing running.

Our users don't care two hoots about BOINC, or science, or computing. That's the whole point of it, we appeal to entirely non-techies who wouldn't otherwise participate in BOINC in a million years. They're all new to it, the silent majority. That's also why our forums aren't nearly as busy as regular BOINC groups: they're not remotely interested. Our adverts specifically emphasise 'it's all automatic, you never have to lift a finger again after installing', etc.

We use many different types of online ads, and yes we use bundling too, so long as it is strictly opt IN. We have never used opt out, ever (Opt out is far more efficient, too. It costs us extra to do it the most ethical way.)

"This means they could decide not to pay anything to charities or users and still be honest, this in my opinion is intentionally misleading"

And yet we do exactly the opposite. We have been paying donations and prizes even when under no obligation to. You even noticed that yourself. How is that anything but a plus?

We have a 27 page ethical policy that was written by one of our partners (who can all see our books on request). We apply strict KYC/AML rules to all customers, and we turn more away than we accept. And in the end, we now have over half a million new machines running BOINC, constantly donating vast amounts of processing to science that, without us, simply wouldn't be there.

You can call us inefficient, pipe dreamers, whatever. But we are 100% ethical.

I'll give you one thing, you would make a good politician.

You'll have to forgive me if I don't believe you, you twist and turn and are obviously good at making things look all good on the surface. Unfortunately once you scratch the surface it all looks a little less shiny.

"We have creditors because we took on seed investment and loans to exist. This is totally normal for a tech startup."

Is it normal for a tech startup to increase their net liabilities by 20x over 6 years? Oh and since this company has existed for 10 years you're hardly a startup anymore yet your liabilities continue to grow, not diminish. The only place you seem to be earning any money is from investors overpaying for shares.

What this says to me is that you're not making a profit and trying to force something to exist that shouldn't.

"This has been a very hard and unrewarding mission: to bring millions of completely non-techie users to BOINC, by incentivising them with other means (supporting charity and the prizes). It has also meant finding paying customers to keep the whole thing running."

So you tell people you'll donate money to charity and give them prizes (which you do), but your prime motivation is to resell their computing power to corporations when able. So in reality you're attempting to make money off other people's hardware, which entails no costs to yourself, save for advertising. Pretty slick scheme to make yourselves some money, if it worked, but it doesn't it would appear. Basically you're trying to be GOLEM but with the bonus of being able to take a cut of any paying customers that exist. Seems pretty unnecessary to me.

There are lots of hosts at Citizen Science Grid with erroring or aborted workunits. Then when they error/abort, legitimate users can't get their results validated properly and therefore lose credit. Also, these hosts drain the WU cache , keeping others from receiving fresh WUs.

Check out the CSG message boards for some example bad hosts:
https://www.csgrid.org/csg/forum_thread.php?id=2534

Most are running BOINC version 7.0.80 (!) which means... Charity Engine.

I wonder how many aborted WUs are frustrated users killing tasks when CPU is pegged at 100%?

So much wasted crunching power! So annoying!