RE: News article: Power-hog bitcoin may find answers in scientific bounty hunt
Notice how this press coverage is related to a prime number discovery. This reminds me of the PrimeGrid subproject "17 or bust", which is trying to solve the famous Sierpinski conjecture. If Gridcoin rallied its forces and contributed substantially towards solving the problem, that would probably generate news coverage for Gridcoin and BOINC as a whole. (Plus, the person who makes the discovery which solves the conjecture would be semi-famous!)
The only problem is that the subproject is CPU-only and can't compete magnitude-wise with the GPU-based tasks in other PrimeGrid subprojects. So the monetary incentive is low.
I wonder how difficult it would be for the PrimeGrid administrators to reorganize their server structure so 17 or bust qualified as a separate project. I kinda doubt they'd want to do that though. There are plenty of non-Gridcoin people on that side of things who would probably make a fuss.
Very interesting. Maybe they should simply reduce the reward for GPU projects or find a way to use GPUs on the remaining Sierpinski numbers
The former suggestion makes the most sense to me since credits are pretty arbitrary anyways, but the idea would probably be met with some resistance from the general PrimeGrid community. Many people there have measured their overall contributions by "badges" corresponding to certain credit amounts. Also, teams and individuals compete with each other via total credit. This doesn't matter to someone like me of course, but it might matter to some.
The latter suggestion seems straightforward too. Surely the people at PrimeGrid would have thought of this already? Maybe there's some reason why they haven't implemented it yet?
Actually, there was a post by someone in their forums a few days ago suggesting similar ideas: see here. So far there's only been crickets though.