One request that I would like to see considered. Require team Biblepay to receive rewards.
Currently, we are open to exploit by a botnet. Its believed we are losing a large and measurable percentage to botnet(s) and it's not inconceivable it could exceed 50% with little difficulty, since this is what Monero, the hybrid CPU/GPU coin is suspected to be at.
Right now, Team Biblepay is 76th, with RAC of 30K, the top team is Team Gridcoin with 4.8M RAC. I understand the desire to reach out and open the door for more users, but I worry that the current proposal of allowing anyone to receive rewards regardless of team, allows for Gridcoin users to effectively get credit at Gridcoin as well as at Biblepay for no more work (since they can be Team Gridcoin for Gridcoin rewards, and use just their user Account Key to get BBP). Since Gridcoin users are on some level participating in R@h for Cryptocurrency rewards, it seems reasonable to think many, if not most, will gravitate to BBP since they can buy 1 BBP to receive rewards. If, and I say IF, they are there solely for the reward and we cannot minister to them, then they are no better to our core users than the botnet. If we reached the 1% ranking, we'd have roughly 100K RAC, if 25% of the Gridcoin users started with BBP, they'd have 1M RAC, and so if we could not convert them as genuine users, we'd be back to a 10% - 90% split with the majority of the coins going to people outside our user base. Additionally, by not requiring team Biblepay membership, we lose a valuable asset which is the PR benefit from the overall ranking on R@h which could very easily be top 10 to maybe top 5 in a very short period of time. Because without requiring to be a part of team Biblepay, most of our users I believe will end up on team Gridcoin as that would make the most financial sense.
I believe the goal to move to PoDC is a good one. This particular piece of the puzzle however, I am concerned about and think needs addressed before the implementation.
In the end, the question to me boils down to, are there many R@h users we can reach out to that would not join us if they had to leave their current teams. If so, can we reach more users with our own higher ranking team?
Yes, you have valid concerns. I have always actually been on the side of the fence where the least the researcher can do is join the team in order to receive rewards. I have held Rob Halfords perspective on double dipping, back when Ripple offered a chance to receive Ripple rewards for boinc users, if they crunch a certain project- at that time one of the same projects Gridcoin users crunched. The rule in Gridcoin was those users must be within the team in order to receive rewards, and that prevented double rewards from both Ripple and Gridcoin.
However I saw a lot of scalability arguments against the team requirement and I guess I originally thought, hey lets solve that problem with Biblepay! Lets make a feature where we have unlimited scalability and open the door to the massive Boinc Userbase (of over 1 million accounts). So, under the hood Biblepay is now prepared for that. We can literally handle the entire Boinc userbase if necessary (it requires us to increment a flag to send out multiple superblock payments per day, but we dont have to monkey with that feature until we have more than 32767 researchers on board).
But honing in on this issue Ive actually always been on the side of the fence where a miner should provide some value for us, and with that, they receive rewards, and have more of a propensity to buy and hold BBP for the long term - and be a loyal user (in contrast to a miner who comes and uses us, and pumps n dumps the coin).
So, in light of that view, I think we need to support requiring the team in order to mine biblepay. We still support unlimited users, but the user must jump in and modify the team from the Rosetta account and join our team to receive rewards.
This way, when we go live, we will not only eliminate the botnet, but we will only have loyal users pulling slices of the BBP pie per day. This will allow us to grow slowly in an organic Christian way, we can reach out to small swaths at a time and promote Christian values and see if we scare them away.
Great idea, Im going to add two features to the core client:
1) A system wide spork, to hold the Team Required Value (our team=15044 btw, Biblepay).
2) If the spork is active, PODC payments require Team Biblepay
3) The SanctuaryQuorum will be modified to log the users team in the contract
4) The exec getboincinfo will be modified to display the team, and display a corresponding warning if the team is required, enabled, and the user is not part of the team: Warning - This CPID is not part of team Biblepay - This CPID is not receiving rewards for research work
Etc
We will need everyone to upgrade to test this.
Client will be ready in 2 hours.