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RE: Why Gridcoin Whitelisting Must Go

in #gridcoin7 years ago

I agree that the current process of maintaining the white-list requires too much interaction from both administrators and the community but i'm glad to see discussions on proposals to streamline the system.
If the Do you think Total Credit Delta is something that should be implemented in 2018 vote passes and is implemented the white-list will no longer require micro-management for projects that have a shortage of work and allow projects with intermittent work to be white-listed without causing the disproportionate payment issues that we have now.
I think we should avoid issuing polls to de-list projects that are causing disproportionate rewards and deal with the issue pro-actively through policy rather than re-actively through a series of individual polls. I feel that asking "Should {your favorite project} be removed due to lack of work units" invites community members to vote against maintaining a fair reward system. If a project is genuinely threatening the fairness of the payment system it should be quarantined (automatically or by an administrator) with a vote to de-list issued only if the work unit availability remains below a safe threshold for an extended period of time.
I support the proposals being discussed in the WU availability status for Gridcoin whitelisted projects thread as a policy to handle the quarantining of projects that cause disproportionate payments due to lack of work.
Polling also has a built in latency which makes it an inefficient means of dealing with temporary work shortages as the project in question may increase work flow by the time the poll is complete while potentially creating disproportionate payments during the time the poll was open.

I'd argue that we'd be much better served simply accepting any project that can provide sufficient work units and has not been identified as malicious in some form or fashion. Research participants can decide whether to back these projects with their crunching choices, and if the projects are malicious they can be detected and blacklisted heuristically or by voting^.

The results of recent polls Should there be an enforced minimum BOINC project requirements checklist for whitelist status? and
What properties of whitelisted BOINC projects do you currently perceive to be equal?
show community support for including research based projects with adequate work availability and minimal to moderate project requirements, perhaps this could be a basis for automatic white-list approval with other projects accepted subject to a community poll.
Perhaps the number of Gridcoin registered CPIDs contributing to a project could be used as a trigger to begin the automatic white-listing process as members of the Gridcoin community will have already shown support for a project by being active contributors.

For fraudulent or malicious projects, we can implement a blacklist similar to the current whitelist^.

I think black-list vs white-list is really just a semantic difference at this stage of the conversation. Whether it is better to exclude all projects except for white-listed vs include all projects except for black-listed will depend on how the main issues in this thread are eventually handled in code.

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Thanks for the detailed feedback.

I still think blacklist vs. whitelist is an important distinction because it's a matter of inclusion. As @limacoin said above:

that would like to use the distributed computing power of BOINC, shall be obliged to invest first in setting-up a BOINC project, invest in the development of a working app and at the end be exposed to the approval of the community (If the project is whitelisted or not) waiting several weeks for the result of the vote.

A blacklist guarantees inclusion, even if only on a tiered basis, in exchange for the pain of setting everything up. Whitelisting means it's uncertain and a lot of people will never bother to do it in the first place since there's no guarantee of inclusion.