Why Gridcoin Beats Golem Hands Down
Gridcoin and Golem both aim to offer distributed computing functionality with a cryptocurrency angle. At the most basic, the differences between Gridcoin and Golem are:
- Gridcoin provides an always-on supercomputing cluster that incentivizes participation intrinsically as part of its blockchain security.
- Golem is attempting to create a “prosumer market” for spare computing power. I.e., “AirBnB for computing”.
While Golem’s extreme immaturity (currently, a single-purpose, CPU-only, rendering-only prototype with no general SDK or functional marketplace) means that some of these observations may eventually prove inaccurate, as it stands today, the Golem approach is flawed on a number of fronts:
1) There’s little evidence that demand for any such “prosumer” market exists on the buy side; said market would require a large volume of tasks bigger than a single computer can handle, but too small to justify either a) renting a cluster directly or b) investing development effort to create a BOINC project to take advantage of a huge existing free cluster. While there may be a market on the sell side, sellers may well find themselves unable to compete or participate at prices buyers are willing to pay, or that their computing power is too low to attract buyers at all.
Gridcoin ensures that there is always incentive for both “buyers” and “sellers” by simply processing all projects and distributing basic rewards to all participants.
2) Since Golem is an auction rather than a platform-as-a-service, it will be nearly impossible for buyers to determine costs and capacities ahead of time. Buyers must basically establish contracts for each individual task on a just-in-time basis rather than buying general capacity. In addition, sellers may well be forced by inefficiencies of scale or electricity costs to price their services too high for would-be buyers to consider over existing services.
Gridcoin won’t necessarily enable superior capacity planning, but it ensures a basic, fixed amount of participation in every project on the network at no cost to the “buyer”, which Golem cannot do.
3) By focusing on auctioning, Golem is basically providing bits-and-pieces computing rather than a true cluster. Tasks aren’t equally attractive to all participants in the network and there’s no assurance that any particular portion of the network will be willing to participate in Golem projects at whatever price is being offered by buyers (or that buyers will be able to afford to buy any particular amount of participation).
See above.
4) Many Golem fans assume that existing cloud computing providers will adopt Golem as a middleman for excess capacity. However, there is no evidence that such excess capacity exists on a general level. Businesses have no incentive to provision more capacity than they believe they can sell; overselling is more typical. Such arguments also assume it will be less profitable for these businesses to sell or otherwise utilize their own capacity directly, another dangerous assumption. (See here for a discussion of the “excess capacity” myth.) While anecdotes abound (“my render farm would love to sell its excess capacity”), there are existing services that already enable this (for example, Bitwrk) and their adoption is weak.
Not really relevant to Gridcoin, as its success needs or makes no such assumptions.
5) For buyers with strong security needs or stringent deadline and budget requirements, anonymous sellers offer them no recourse in case of theft or failure to deliver, which may be unacceptable given the need to control costs or have legal recourse in the case of IP violations. In addition, many parties (both buyers and sellers) may be legally obligated to avoid contracting with particular regions, companies, or individuals (e.g., OFAC’s SDN list) and Golem’s blind architecture may expose them to unacceptable legal risks.
While all distributed computing projects face difficult challenges regarding security of IP, Gridcoin at least guarantees a base amount of project participation, which Golem cannot do. Gridcoin also does not contract with, buy, or sell anything to any party.
6) There is little motivation for anyone to participate in Golem who isn’t either a speculator or actively trying to sell capacity (with the electricity and wear-and-tear costs that implies). Golem has a fixed supply of tokens that have already been distributed and no further tokens will be created, nor is there a staking mechanism (Golem is not a blockchain).
Gridcoin retains full staking coin functionality as part of its proof-of-research security mechanism, meaning anybody can participate as an investor and earn a small amount of interest without the added overhead of participating in task crunching if they aren’t interested or it isn’t cost-effective to do so.
7) Golem will require buyers to invest in developers able to use a (yet-to-be-developed, much less released) custom Golem SDK (rather than an existing, battle-tested open platform) for creating tasks that can be distributed on the Golem network. In addition, the complexity of developing Golem-compatible tasks is unknown, since Golem is far from providing a general-purpose computing platform and any supposed ease-of-use advantage is completely speculative at this point.
Gridcoin is based on BOINC. BOINC is a fully-open platform with years of development, bug fixes, and optimizations already invested. The process is well-documented and there is a huge ecosystem already in place. In addition, the development investment offers guaranteed participation.
8) From a cryptoenthusiast perspective, Golem does not have its own blockchain (it is an Ethereum token) and cannot add features or fix issues on the blockchain. If at some point there are problems or insufficiencies in Ethereum, Golem cannot resolve them without implementing its own blockchain or moving to another codebase, both of which are huge efforts.
Gridcoin has its own blockchain, is already a staking coin (which ETH looks to be moving toward), and can implement smart contracts at a later date (already a roadmap item) to duplicate key ETH functionality while providing additional unique features such as its neural network-based consensus mechanism and on-chain voting.
9) As a special-purpose marketplace application, GNT will never be able to incentivize participation apart from fees paid by businesses — i.e., Golem can never duplicate Gridcoin. However, Gridcoin can easily create external services layered on top of its base functionality (e.g., a marketplace of BOINC projects to vetted participants with escrow services ensuring payment), thus Gridcoin can eventually duplicate Golem’s auction-based offering.
Gridcoin initially positioned itself as a science coin to attract the participation of the hundreds of thousands of existing BOINC users across dozens of BOINC projects. As Gridcoin has grown in value, arguably the appeal has broadened well beyond this original audience and Gridcoin now draws new participants into the BOINC ecosystem on its own merits. While Gridcoin still offers value to and could benefit from the participation of remaining BOINC users, Gridcoin should step forward and openly embrace business use (BOINC itself does so now: “Companies – use BOINC for desktop grid computing”) in its marketing. With Gridcoin, businesses are assured of at least a basic amount of participation in their projects, and can easily incentivize increased participation by purchasing and distributing Gridcoin to project participants (and this will naturally raise the value of Gridcoin, attract more participants, and increase the overall capacity of the Gridcoin supercomputer.)
Finally, since Gridcoin is not attempting to rebuild a task distribution and validation system from nothing, it benefits from the entire collective skills of the BOINC ecosystem, including the core dozens of contributors and the 30,000+ code commits that help ensure that BOINC functions securely and efficiently cross-platform. Golem is attempting to redo all of this work from scratch with a handful of enthusiasts, only to end up with something that is less than a supercomputer and more of a grab bag, and can never be more than it’s setting out to be.
Originally posted on NateOnTheNet's Blog, permission provided to repost. Please follow his blog for more excellent articles!
Best regards,
CM.
After reading your post , I am all for you and switch my Golem to Gridcoin. Thanks !
Great to hear! :)
Gridcoin and BOINC are a great combination. BOINC supports all sorts of causes and science worldwide and is completly open, anybody can set-up a project and benefit from volunteer distributed computing.
Gridcoin can only encourage more people to crunch for BOINC and give something back.
couldn't agree more
I predict that one day Gridcoin could have a trade value similar to that of STEEM. However, that is just speculation. Right now STEEM has a market value of 20 times that of Gridcoin. There are also almost 1.5 times more Gridcoin on the market than STEEM tokens. As Gridcoin grows in popularity, it could one day reach a similar market price to STEEM. Gridcoin is a great coin to help diversify Crypto holdings.
Earlier this month we had a brief period of trading volume greater than Steem, Bitshares and Golem combined on Poloniex.
Nobody even bothered to reply on the behalf of Golem, and this is the most prominent post on their trending list for 5 days now. Well, that line of thinking ("who cares, our marketcap is huge") is not really healthy for any crypto, especially a distributed computing one. Markets will recover from today's lows, but many users will leave Golem forever (since there was no real involvement anyway).
It must be difficult to reply when you're reading information that indicates your investment is seriously risky and entirely speculative, with a better alternative out there with a far lower market cap.
valuable information, thanks,
Thank you for this post. I've been wondering whether or not to pick up GRC, now I know. Followed and resteemed as well.
Great to hear :)
An excellent analysis. Thanks for your time in putting that together and very well written. not dry either ! I'm getting a feeling there's a new newspaper in the proteus stage of concepts.. the NFT.. New Financial Times.. Or perhaps FIN-TECH DAILY.. ( you definitely have a regular column)
this below from your article sums it up for me. ! all about the BOINC
"Gridcoin initially positioned itself as a science coin to attract the participation of the hundreds of thousands of existing BOINC users across dozens of BOINC projects. As Gridcoin has grown in value, arguably the appeal has broadened well beyond this original audience and Gridcoin now draws new participants into the BOINC ecosystem on its own merits."
Originally posted on NateOnTheNet's Blog, permission provided to repost. Please follow his blog for more excellent articles!
Glad you enjoyed the article though :)
very nicely written and I learned something from it.. I'm a big fan of Gridcoin but didn't really understand Golem ! long live the BOINC
I am super pumped about the prospects of Gridcoin! I wasn't sure if there were that many followers of GRC, but it sounds like I found the guru! Definitely following!
The Gridcoin community is growing everyday, our IRC channel (Freenode #Gridcoin) up until recently has been the most active communications platform with over 100 users present but we've also got a growing telegram group: https://t.me/gridcoin
Once we remove the mandatory team requirement, we face a potential growth of userbase up to 500k active BOINC users, so there are very exciting times ahead of us!
Thank you for introducing me to Gridcoin, followed and resteemed
Thanks for the heads up... Up vote 4-U
Thanks.. that answering me the whole time.. I've been looking why is the golem price hike. But no specialties other than a supercomputer.. that is will be death project.
Golem is a distributed computing network without crunchers and, in normal circumstances, it would have been considered as little more than a 'pie in the sky'. But they have skillfully used their association with Ethereum to create some powerful hype, so kudos to their marketing. A fraction of this hype spills over to Gridcoin, since we are broadly targeting the same segment (distributed computing).
In the end, if there are at least 3 'decentralized storage' coins out there, there's bound to be at least 15 distributed computing coins, since distributed computing is a more practicable and mainstream idea which existed long before crypto and is easily associated with now ubiquitous 'mining'.
Gridcoin community is fortunate to have Nate's strong and eloquent advocacy on these matters, donate to his grcgo.com to show some well-deserved support.
Read (tnse) the first argument. Bull fucking shit. And tldr.
Just read the post? You could read the first sentence of each paragraph then the emphasised sections afterwards? Please read more before coming to a conclusion, having a higher market cap doesn't mean that it's better.
Golem community should be grateful for such well articulated articles, it's like a blueprint for 'what to improve next'. I wish someone could write a similar article about Gridcoin, pointing out things which need improvement. An expert would most likely point out many things we haven't thought of yet (since we are probably too subjective). However, all we get is shit this shit that... it's childish, really.
Wow, that's an intelligent rebuttal.
With creative writing skills like that you are sure to go a long way.
Yall love me. I know you do. Everybodys allowed to be drunk once in a while. Ha ha ha.
Haha, no worries bud :D
Just bought a bit of my first Gridcoins, thanks for the advice!
@cm-steem thanks for comparision
I suggest you check out my post on a coin that has real promise due to its technological and financial backing. Gridcoin looks good, but there are many coins that allow you to make a quick buck and to have a larger quantity of what you're looking for.
https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@digitaldr/ripple-coin-xrp-the-bankers-saving-face
Stop speculating, instead speculate on this other project?
Golem is indeed in alpha with very little in production, their first project already exists via bitwerk (paid) and BURP (entirely free). You're overestimating the desire for decentralized video rendering.
Why would I pay for computation that I can get for free through BOINC?