Start collecting Ethereum tokens for BOINC work!

in #gridcoin7 years ago

Greetings!

I've found this little post on Reddit:

Hello fellow Gridsters!
We are launching a service to reward BOINC miners for their completed work units in Ethereum ERC20 tokens.
These tokens run in parallel to gridcoin, so you can collect both coins! There are no team requirements!
You can find more about our project at http://kingsds.network/alpha.html
Anyone can sign-up for the rewards at http://alpha.kingsds.network
The Soft Launch will run for the week of July 30th 2017 to August 6th 2017 at which point we plan to go live!
You can contact us at our e-mail: [email protected] with any questions or concerns.
Thank you!

Sounds interesting!

Sort:  

Not only does their website lack most critical information, a lot of it makes no sense or is just plain wrong.

They say that:

In order to establish a market our network needs a base amount of both miners and work. We will be launching our coin on top of the BOINC network to establish this base. The Alpha will begin this September 2017 and run until our proprietary network gains critical mass.

Critical mass of what? People running BOINC sure as hell are not going to be running a POW set-up alongside this as well, so what is the aim? And then BOINC miners are being cut out down the line? Further, on the topic of Gridcoin they say:

They have done very well as a coin, but they have no paid developers and their code is largely committed by a single actor which has caused slow development.

Which is plain wrong as of right now. We have just passed a system to pay devs, and several programmers make significant commits to github.

This whole thing sounds to me like someone is trying to scam people by using the open source GRC distribution code with the pretense of something more coming from this token down the line. My bet is nothing will ever come of it.

I mean come on, they are having a damn ICO on a Golem/Gridcoin clone!

Claiming to be better, because we are using "The Last Generation of Blockchain Tech" while their site hasn't even implemented SSL/TLS (not even for login) is somehow ironic xD

Well, I've signed up to be a guinea pig and see what happens. They are apparently validating CPIDs by having you sign up for Rosetta. I haven't used Rosetta, so I've added the project but my CPID isn't the same as my others, so now I'm having to run some Rosetta stuff to see if it syncs up. You cannot just enter your CPID - you need to enter your Rosetta ID and then post to a message board with your public key.

Seems difficult to use already...

Okay, so my Rosetta account has synced and I've posted my public key to the message board as requested: https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=12145&postid=86928#86928

When I hit connect it amazingly was able to look up my CPID, so that was nice. Below that you then can select projects from a drop-down, currently the list includes:

  • SETI
  • PrimeGrid
  • Rosetta
  • Einstein
  • Climate Prediction
  • Milky Way
  • LHC
  • Asteroids
  • Yoyo
  • Cosmology

Supposedly you can request more by e-mailing; I've e-mailed to request WCG.

For each one you, you need to enter your project ID number (not your CPID).

Beyond that, not much else to see, just a single page, nothing else is available right now. I'll let you know if I end up earning any SPARC.

So in less than 8 hours, the admins responded to my comment and added WCG. They also added a bunch of other projects:

  • Amicable Numbers
  • Citizen Science Grid
  • Collatz
  • Skynet Pogs
  • SRBase
  • Sztaki Desktop Grid
  • Leiden Classical
  • Moo!
  • NFS
  • Numbers Field
  • TN Grid
  • Universe@Home
  • VGTU
  • WCG
  • YAFU

Still no signs of any SPARC earned yet, but even if I did earn some this week, they wouldn't pay out. It looks like the real Alpha will possible payouts begins August 6.

Still pretty positive sign how responsive the admins are.

Another scam ICO for the ages. =)

Business people doing business things.

Not a fan.

Why do you think that it is a scam?

First and foremost, it's an ICO involving Ethereum. It is identical to other ETH distributed processing concepts but claims to be fresh and new -- it mentions Gridcoin specifically to point out flaws that do not exist (FUD) and information that is bias in context. For example, they say GRC uses "The Last Generation of Blockchain Tech." They are saying this while this "Last Generation" is $45 billion dollars secure and what they claim to be the latest generation (ETH) isn't even secure yet -- the dao, parity, etc.. They don't mention EOS and they don't mention Golem or SONM or iEx. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they're knowledgeable -- so why did they make these choices? Beyond that:

  • Hype: Latest technology! And with this new untested technology (crypto/eth) you somehow get the best security!

  • "Serial Entrepreneur" as a CEO

  • "The majority of my career has been occupied by the challenging task of commercializing university-based research discoveries into meaningful products and services." "Commercializing U-B research" means taking research from people who know what they're doing and finding a way to make money off of it, often at the researchers expense. It takes research funded by tax dollars (at least in the US) and gives it to private corporations. It is a major reason medicine is so expensive and why new research is turned into a product so slowly. UBR commercialization as a business model is itself a scam.

  • The language they use is future tense: "Are building" vs "have built."

  • Funding stops after the crowdsale. ??? I guess they expect to live and fund off of their hoards of SPARC which I suppose they think will be worth something for some reason. That's a huge gamble for a company wanting to develop something over several years.

  • "Supply creates demand" ??? Standard startup con line.

  • Their timeline appears to be "Once A then B" which gives them the freedom to ignore the timeline.

These folks appear to prioritize profit over development. Their intentions seem to be to make money, not to advance distributed processing. And for people who have run three supposedly successful businesses, their website and information is horrible.

The main reason is the ICO part though. If you have a real product worth funding you don't need to have an ICO in which you attempt to get funding from people who have no knowledge of the industry and who are most likely in the crypto world to speculate.

Still, they could be legitimate and come out with something amazing, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Thank you for explaining it. :)

Because they are launching another ETH token that has zero points of difference.

I must confess that i've stopped reading after "rewarding for BOINC work" because if someone wan't to reward me doing e.g. SETI crunching well - why not? And if i really earn some tokens this way i'll convert them to GRC. :D

True, you may get some tokens out of it. I had a closer look and it appears they are trying to be the GPU counterpart to Golem's paid compute model - only rewarding GPU projects.

At the end of the day, this still looks a lot like another ICO scam.

Because their principals are so different from ours.

GRC = Anyone can start a project for free and so long as they can convince people to work on it, it gets worked on.

Everyone else, including SPARC = Pay to Play

Obvious Scam is Obvious.

As explained in the other comments. Please upvote them.

A response from reddit:

"So far we have raised $50k USD in funding and we are moving towards another round, with much of this to go to marketing."

Marketing for what? Where is the product?

Is there any proof of said funds being raised?

say me whats wrong ? you talk about GRC and let us see the BTC ?
what is this with the new "coin" what is just token :-)

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This sounds a lot like a me too coin with empty promises for willing investors.