Why Gridcoin Whitelisting Must Go

Ahoy! Incoming Wall o' Text!

First, definitions.

Gridcoin: Gridcoin is a cryptocurrency that "reward[s] volunteer distributed computing" on top of a proof-of-stake blockchain.

BOINC: The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. Basically, this is a free, open-source SDK (Software Development Kit) which provides the infrastructure for deploying and tracking progress on distributed computing projects. Anybody can use it to make their own platform. Contrary to popular belief, this is not restricted to scientific projects. BOINC explicitly supports business use cases. [Note: the linked page is currently down but is linked as "Companies" from the BOINC main page.]

Whitelisting: In order to reward volunteer distributed computing, the Gridcoin network maintains a list of URLs of BOINC projects for which distributed computing contributions will be honored. Currently, inclusion onto this list is facilitated by decentralized on-chain voting (this one, for example) and manual whitelisting by a trusted administrator following vote outcomes. Removal follows the same process.

Why whitelisting?

Presumably, the purpose of whitelisting is to avoid including projects in the network which convey unfair advantages to participants or are in some form or fashion "malicious." This means that if a project publishes fake or altered stats, or consistently fails to provide enough work to give all Gridcoin participants a chance to earn GRC for completing its work units, or in some other way does not appeal to the voting participants, it will not be whitelisted or will be removed from the list.

So why is it bad?

Whitelisting has been a perfectly acceptable way to get Gridcoin off the ground. It avoids the need for a potentially complex engine to identify and automate the inclusion of valid projects, and makes it fairly easy to remove projects that don't meet the community standards for inclusion into the reward pool.

Going forward, it needs to go.

1. Whitelisting is political.

This is the most important objection. By definition, any process that requires a vote for inclusion is subject to the subjective whims and tastes of the participants. For example, climate change and applied genetics are often controversial areas of science, subject to bitter arguments on national stages. We still find people with religious qualms about some types of earth sciences. Cold fusion is still up for debate. Once, it was heresy to support heliocentrism. And Gridcoin itself has a strong core set of participants who believe that no commercial projects should be supported by the network despite no technical reason for their exclusion.

Rather than arguing about where to draw the line -- do we allow climate projects? do we allow projects not sponsored directly by major universities? do we exclude projects funded by grant money tied back to commercial entities? do we accept commercial projects, and if so, which ones? -- 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^.

Gridcoin has no technical dependency on particular ideologies or positions on a commercial-academic spectrum, and we shouldn't arbitrarily enforce a social dependency.

2. Manual whitelisting is very centralized.

Currently, whitelisting is implemented manually according to the results of a vote. This is flawed on several fronts. What happens if an administrator decides not to honor the result of a vote? What happens if one or all of the handful of administrators are disabled or unavailable to implement whitelist votes? What if someone is bribed to include a project that was never voted on?

There are too many ways this is potentially unhealthy for the network. It slows down the process of inclusion -- and also the process of excluding potentially bad projects. Much better to do this algorithmically to the fullest extent possible.

3. Whitelisting (as implemented, at least) is undemocratic.

Currently, the outcome of whitelist votes on Gridcoin are weighted by a combination of BOINC work credit and stakeholding. This means that the opinions of major miners and holders is grossly disproportionate to smaller miners and holders. There are arguments that these individuals are the most interested in the coin's "success" and most likely to vote in a "self-interested fashion" that presumably benefits everyone, but simultaneously people are arguing that Gridcoin's success shouldn't be determined by market cap, which means that the definition of "success" and "benefit" is not even agreed. We have many people who believe success should be a price and others who believe it should be scientific discoveries and nothing else.

From a sociological perspective, this process also means that a tiny demographic with unknown characteristics dominates the voting process, by definition in intrinsically biased ways, with potential consequences for the exclusion of particular types of science or commercial projects that do not meet this unknown demographic's norms or values. See the first point above for how this is a bad thing.

So what's a better alternative?

I strongly encourage the investigation and eventual adoption of an automated process where projects are submitted, analyzed, and included or rejected. For fraudulent or malicious projects, we can implement a blacklist similar to the current whitelist^. I don't propose any specific process here, only that our development community begin to investigate ways to automate this. We have some of the smartest people on the planet, so I'm sure we can come up with something that is less political, less centralized, and less oligarchic than the process we currently employ.

^ A small note about blacklisting: I believe blacklists should really be greylists, expiring after some period of time. Otherwise, they suffer from the same political weaknesses as whitelisting; for example, an unpopular project could be chasing some scientific insight that later is proved valid, but currently unpopular or in opposition to the voting demographic's norms and values. It would be better to quarantine these projects for some period of time, ideally long enough to kill off opportunistic parasites but not so long that it permanently fetters a valid project.