Brainstorming Gridcoinstats Ideas Thread [25 SBD in Bounty]

xaqfields (51) · 7 years ago (edited)

I've chatted with you a bit about this, but I think the best thing GridcoinStats could add that it doesn't have already is a mining profitability calculator for each project. It has been done before (Katieee had one that used to work) and IMO it's just a huge source of ambiguity in Gridcoin right now that we don't have a great way to estimate mining profitability.

I would recommend something where the user could input their anticipated RAC (would require them to do a little bit of research on the top builds in the project so estimate where they would land) and then we could have a simple script that would spit out an estimated Magnitude at that RAC and daily GRC.

I remember Katieee's calculator would use CPID, which is also possible. But I question the utility of calculating it off of CPID because if you're already crunching the project, you already know what your RAC is, no? I wasn't around when that calculator was actually functioning unfortunately. Was it able to look at what you were doing for one project and estimate how well you would do on another? That would be ideal, but I can't think of a way to do that.

$0.62

10 votes

dutch (61) · 7 years ago (edited)

While a mining profitability calculator would be nice, I see very little value in having a calculator go from RAC --> GRC/day. The difficulty is reaching a good estimate for RAC in the first place.

The other big problem with basing the calculator off the hardware of other miners is that:

Many top miners keep their hardware (hosts) hidden
We have no idea how much time the hardware is live. It could be running only half the time.

I am 100% for a mining calculator, but I have not found a reliable way to estimate GRC mining profits on the fly.

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xaqfields (51) · 7 years ago (edited)

While a mining profitability calculator would be nice, I see very little value in having a calculator go from RAC --> GRC/day. The difficulty is reaching a good estimate for RAC in the first place.

I think you're just too smart a guy to understand how helpful that would actually be. The average Gridcoin miner is not actually intimately familiar with the reward calculation. That's why these calculators have existed in the past and why we get people coming into the Subreddit on a weekly basis pointing out the fact that Katieee's calculator doesn't work and suggesting that we should set up a functioning calculator.

Some people do hide their machines, but if you use the "top computers" list, you can see all the machines (it just attributes hidden machines to an anonymous owner) and very easily gauge RAC potential for your hardware.

Once you have that, you and I could just grab our calculators and do the rest of the math ourselves, but most people can't do that.

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dutch (61) · 7 years ago

You make some good points about simplifying the process for people not familiar with the system. I guess what I should have said is that I see more value in a calculator going from hardware --> RAC, than a calculator going from RAC --> GRC mint. Of course, a calculator that goes straight from hardware --> GRC mint would be phenominal.

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xaqfields (51) · 7 years ago

Indeed! I dropped you a line on Slack. I think there are some potential ways to do it but they require some pre-research... presearch? Anyway we would have to do some up-front legwork but I think there's a path toward making it happen. It just might not cover every single CPU/GPU under the sun. Maybe we have something set up that can handle maybe 75% of the rigs out there.

We'll talk more soon.

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I wrote the following in the 'for the betterment of BOINC' thread:

cm-steem (67) · 7 years ago

I think we may need a 4th gen BOINC credit mechanism or some form of benchmarking on an individual project basis (without the need for 2 weeks of crunching) to estimate potential RAC.

If we were able to benchmark attainable RAC with the user's computer (through a project specific benchmark perhaps) then they would be able to work out how much GRC they could earn ahead of crunching (currently you need to crunch for weeks before figuring this out), this could help users make a more educated project selection.

Likewise, on the topic of RAC - there was a large thread on a possible '4th gen credit mechanism' which attracted a lot of attention last year: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=10953 It would be excellent if further research/discussion was held on an improved credit mechanism.

jedigeiss (72) · 7 years ago

well actually this seems to me more a problem of number crunching out of already existing data sources. For sure this will be the hell of a work and in the end you would end up just with an average per CPU/GPU combination.

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https://steemit.com/gridcoinstats/@sc-steemit/bounty-price-of-25-sbd-only-4-hours-left-to-give-or-vote-for-the-best-idea

sc-steemit (64) · 7 years ago

Congratulations to @xaqfields, your idea brought you 25 SBD :)

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xaqfields (51) · 7 years ago

Yay! Thank you for the opportunity! I hope this process gave you lots of great ideas (for a product you've created which is already great!).

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dutch (61) · 7 years ago

I would love to see a graph of the daily GRC mint and/or total GRC over time. A lot of members reading up about the community ask about how the coin is sustainable with up to 50,000 GRC being minted by POR every day. If we could show them a figure of the daily POS and POR mint, and what that actually means as an inflation percentage, they may not be so worried anymore.

From memory, several people have been asking for daily POR and POS mint tallies anyway.

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9 votes

jringo (63) · 7 years ago

i think this ties in nicely to highcon and grider123's suggestion

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cm-steem (67) · 7 years ago

Whilst there isn't a graph, you can see the daily amount minted on the block page when you scroll down and look at the past few days daily summaries. https://gridcoinstats.eu/block

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chronosamoht (56) · 7 years ago (edited)

I would like to see a blockexplorer dedicated to superblocks. Maybe some line plots giving the time laps between two superblocks, or the mag unit. Some stats like mean, variance (overall mean, and the mean for the last month).
Probably easier for developers to diagnose a bug if something is not working properly on staking of superblocks.

Thanks for the good work you put on gridcoinstats !

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frank0051 (42) · 7 years ago

I've suggested this for Fediverse as well a week or two ago; great call!

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sc-steemit (64) · 7 years ago

That is a good suggestion.
The page will have a better overview of the Superblocks in the future.

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frank0051 (42) · 7 years ago

As a second suggestion, I would like to see the block explorer be open source so other people could build off of it. I would be particularly interested in setting up my own so I could get a SQL database of all the good stuff locked inside the coin's blockchain.

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6 votes

sc-steemit (64) · 7 years ago

Considering I've spent hundreds of hours with making an explorer from the ground up with quite the lack of documentation on many accounts, there will be no open-sourcing of the explorer.

Nice idea though, can't blame one for trying ;)

PS: There might (no timeframe) be an expansion of the API access in the future. With the gridcoin.asia explorer down and out of sync as well sometimes, there are no real good APIs for the wallet online. I've been thinking about it, but yet not decided how to do it.

$1.62

5 votes

frank0051 (42) · 7 years ago (edited)

But, I mean, isn't that kind of the point? We had Katiee's thing now GridCoin Asia having problems every now and then and I'm pretty sure there used to be another block explorer at some point too. If any of this had been open sourced - even just the base of it - others (with greater skill than I) could be contributing so not everyone has to from scratch again and more advanced features could be added. There is no reason why you cannot keep running ads and have more advanced features that keeps traffic coming to your site and gives you the opportunity to monetize it while their is still a base for people to share and work off of.

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cm-steem (67) · 7 years ago

Sepulcher's asia explorer, gridresearchcorp explorer and katiee's pool/calculators should be open sourced because they are in need for additional development. gridcoinstats is functioning well and has been reliable.

I think it'd be a great idea for anyone who isn't interested in open sourcing their projects to create guides or light tutorials (hints) on how users could replicate some of the gridcoin specific functionality which could compliment some of the open source block explorer toolkits available right now.

There is no reason why you cannot keep running ads and have more advanced features that keeps traffic coming to your site and gives you the opportunity to monetize it while their is still a base for people to share and work off of.

However, if 10 clones were to pop up then the traffic to gridcoinstats would decrease and ad revenue would decrease. Any proposal for open sourcing a commercial platform should come with a fat bounty which would replace several years future earnings.

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frank0051 (42) · 7 years ago (edited)

Sepulcher's asia explorer, gridresearchcorp explorer and katiee's
pool/calculators should be open sourced because they are in need for additional development. gridcoinstats is functioning well and has been reliable.

I don't think that's the only reason for open sourcing. Look at Google's Chromium - that's open source because it's a basic part of creating standards.

However, if 10 clones were to pop up then the traffic to gridcoinstats would decrease and ad revenue would decrease. Any proposal for open sourcing a commercial platform should come with a fat bounty which would replace several years future earnings.

I think you're overestimating how easy it would be for clones to overtake you
a) only make the basics available, not your advanced features;
d) people have to then find out about the clones
c) you have first mover advantage and a captured audience. Look at Google, how many dozens of clones have been created using Chromium; same could be said with FireFox's open source base. The base still remain with the bigger players.
d) You have a faucet - don't open source that- keep your audience captured.

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sc-steemit (64) · 7 years ago

I do understand your wish for this, but let me point out...

that's open source because it's a basic part of creating standards.

I'm not creating a standard. I'm creating a service. I have no intention of generating a standard for something as I'm not the maker of such standard.

a) only make the basics available...

The basics are pretty basics for anyone to create by their own. I see no need in open-sourcing a project that is just a small script.

Look at Google, how many dozens of clones have been created using Chromium; same could be said with FireFox's open source base.

You're really overselling this. Google is big, not because they have open-sourced Chromium, but because they do so much. Some open-sourced projects are not going to tip them over. They have big moneybag companies behind them, and if the company starts to lose money these projects are the first to be dropped by them. This is one project, a personal and my biggest project thus far. I have no intention to stop expanding it and support it with more features, but it takes time, effort and money from my part.

Besides, more isn't merrier. Can't see how a dozen more clones could make it better. Either it should be all, or nothing. Why release an open-source project that is just a fraction of what we have? It would result in confusion because there will be many clones running with various degrees of services or lack of service.

Sorry, I will not Open-Source it, end of story

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frank0051 (42) · 7 years ago (edited)

The basics are pretty basics for anyone to create by their own. I see no need in open-sourcing a project that is just a small script.

Clearly it's not, otherwise there would be others out there already. I've asked multiple times over the last two months for anything that has the ability to let me know how to migrate some of the blockchain to SQL so I can have some fun exploring it. You know how many takers there have been on providing advice? One; 1! That one person said go find an open source block-chain explorer. I've spent hours trying to figure out how to port stuff over from other blockchains without success; 1) because I'm not a techie and 2) because things are often written with Linux instructions so it's a challenge to figure out how to move it over to WAMP.

And therein lives the challenge: people like you are very talented, and basic building blocks help those that are looking to learn more to be able to start out. It's rather unfortunate that more people don't see it that way. I'm very strong in SQL and structured data; getting something from JSON or whatever the hell our blockchain is stored in - that's a completely different battle. I suspect there are many people like that that have strong suits in certain places too and would benefit greatly from examples that are able to help them. The same challenge exist with GRC in general right now when it comes to trying to modify the UI with QT maker, etc.. So unfortunate...

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https://github.com/grctest/GRC-Haskell

sc-steemit (64) · 7 years ago

@cm-steem (customminer) has made some open-source scripts that you can check out surrounding scraping the Gridcoin wallet.

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Show 1 more reply

cm-steem (67) · 7 years ago

I think that a separate open-source blockchain explorer project would be a good idea instead of gridcoinstats fully open-sourcing itself, after all it's @sc-steemit's business.

It's possible that with some uplifting of the gridcoin codebase we could simply use: https://insight.is/

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frank0051 (42) · 7 years ago

No up-voting of the idea, though. Boo! Come on, you know you want to support it. What are we but not dreamers here in the GRC community.

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cm-steem (67) · 7 years ago (edited)

What's that? Downvote you say? :P

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vortac (60) · 7 years ago

In time, Gridcoinstats will become a new BOINCstats and even bigger than that. The front end of Gridcoin, the very face of distributed volunteer computing, with a very strong scientific background too. With that in mind, I think we should strive to fund it from the Foundation because ads will only dilute our strong scientific, philanthropic and humanitarian messages.

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sc-steemit (64) · 7 years ago

Amen to that 😇

In the meantime you can make people vote for me as a witness here on Steemit as well as BitShares.

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grider123 (62) · 7 years ago

First I want to thank you for all the work you do for gridcoinstats and the community.
What I would like to see on your page is a transaction/day statistic so I can see if more people are trading on the blockchain.

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sc-steemit (64) · 7 years ago

This is as of today already possible. If you look on https://gridcoinstats.eu/block you have the column "Recievers - Volume Sent Coins".

This column shows how many addresses that received a payment from someone else (it wasn't minted coins with PoS/DPoR) as well as how much the volume was.

I will however, make this much more clear on the new page. I will also companion it with some better interactive graphics

chronosamoht (56) · 7 years ago

I suggest also a little upgrade, maybe not worth it but it should be quick :
A countdown for the 1.000.000em block with number of block left and approximate time of wait !

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highcon (26) · 7 years ago (edited)

I like gridcoinstats already a lot as well; very informative! But since you wanted some new ideas, I'd suggest to improve the graphs/stats (they are already well made):

Interactive graphs; like the ones at boincstats.com [link];
I often check out the 4th graph to understand how our Team RAC developed over time
- alternatively: a table of the plotted values
Provide a tick box for all graphs that allows to set baselines to 0 (especially Team RAC)
A graph that compares the individual Team RACs of all white-listed projects together over time (possibly with a logarithmic y-axis)

What I also miss, but Brain from grcpool implemented already nicely [link]:
... a list that allows to filter interactively white-(& gray)-listed projects by the provided application types (Windows, Linux, GPUs, Android, etc.)

dutch (61) · 7 years ago

A graph that compares the individual Team RACs of all white-listed projects together over time (possibly with a logarithmic y-axis)

The difficulty with this one is that projects hand our RAC at hugely varying rates. I have seen a ten fold difference between projects when switching from Moo Wrapper to SETI.

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highcon (26) · 7 years ago (edited)

I know, dutch. Currently, the Team RAC even varies by a factor of ~200 and it can vary even more if a new project got white-listed. For this reason I suggested a logarithmic y-axis. I don't know how this would look like with 25+ lines, but it's the only way to compare the temporal evolution of all projects together in one place.

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dutch (61) · 7 years ago

Team RAC even varies by a factor of ~200

I did not even consider that before, but I assume you are meaning between a CPU and a GPU project, correct? Maybe (if that is even feasible) we could get two graphs to compare RAC between projects - one for CPU and one for GPU, with the RAC in each scaled to some baseline.

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sc-steemit (64) · 7 years ago (edited)

Interactive graphs: In plans. Good suggestion though! Regarding RAC, @dutch has a point. But I could make the graphs so you can see differences in changes per project. Visualizing each project with a line instead of combining them. Combining them wouldn't do much good.

Interactive projects list: Nice. Added to the plans for sure. Been working on adding more details about projects, but not the way it was presented.

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jringo (63) · 7 years ago

+1 more visual stats with interaction

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trikkstar (44) · 7 years ago

I wouldn't mind seeing stats/graphs on the price of GRC across various exchanges, as well as their respective trading volumes.

sc-steemit (64) · 7 years ago

In the plannings. Better Price+Volume graphs will be there, together with all the markets.
Good suggestion!

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alkasai (59) · 7 years ago

Better explanation for noobs like me.
For example on https://www.gridcoinstats.eu/project/ would be super useful to have links to wiki for terms like WUs, RAC, etc. Or better some youtube tutorial.
Look at it from a perspective of someone who is new to this. All of these abbreviations and calculations are confusing as hell.

sc-steemit (64) · 7 years ago

All of these abbreviations and calculations are confusing as hell

Noted :)

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alkasai (59) · 7 years ago

Thank you! =)

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frank0051 (42) · 7 years ago

I have a bit of an esoteric one. There has been some good reporting on the largest wallets and the percentage of the the coin that they own. But, we haven't really see anything regarding the average wallet or median wallet. It was also be interesting to see perhaps decile breakdowns (the 10th percentile GRC wallet owns this much, the 20th percentile owns this much, etc.).

This might be hard given all the burn wallets created for transfers but perhaps we just exclude all the wallets with 0 balances. Alternatively, it would also be reported by CPID sum / some sort of linked wallet calibration.

Again, esoteric, I know, but it's a fairly interesting measure.

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sc-steemit (64) · 7 years ago

Good ideas. I will see what I can come up with based on the data that I have. I think it should be possible to make something good out of this. I think the data that I can collect can allow me to make something good and close to what you suggest.

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trikkstar (44) · 7 years ago

Suggestion #2:
On the User Page adding Estimated Share % and Estimated Reward/Day columns to the Active Projects grid.

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ravonn (53) · 7 years ago

Since the explorer contains so much data and is able to produce even more by creating statistical values, it would be neat (and in most cases just gimmicky) if it integrated with If This Then That.

Have your Hue lights switch colors every time there is a superblock.
Receive a mail when the explorer detects forks.
Alert you if your mag drops

etc

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sc-steemit (64) · 7 years ago

That's a nifty idea. I will look in possibilities to make it work together with something that is IFTTT approved. I imagine a RSS feed would do good for example.

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behappy (54) · 7 years ago

You got my vote and a resteem :]

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aeolipile (34) · 7 years ago

Probably a simple change: add column to your "Active CPIDs" table with a sequential number to identify the rank in the list of each record. The table currently shows: User Name, Last Stake, Minted, Magnitude, & Total Assets. Insert a " # " column to the left of "User Name." Then have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc, for each record. Then viewers can sort via each column like you already have, but then can easily view rank. The numbers should ascend or descend depending on whether the column sort is ascending or descending.

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sc-steemit (64) · 7 years ago

That's a good idea and something I was going to have last time I redesigned the page. Due to some issues with the system I use today to sort the tables I couldn't get this to work, but I will definitely give it another look.

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ropaga (56) · 7 years ago

-Notification for detection of forks, for example by RSS. As far as I know there is no alert system for that (I know @erkan usually submits an article here in Steemit)

-More stats for superblocks: projects included (sometimes not all of them are), filter blocks list to show superblocks only, total PoS and total DPoR reward per block, time between them, number of beacons...

-Add ranking position for Gridcoin team and % of total RAC done by Gridcoin team for every project

Thanks for your work, I think gridcoinstats is pretty good already.

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highcon (26) · 7 years ago

% of total RAC done by Gridcoin team for every project

That one exists already: check the "(X.XX%)" behind "Team RAC:" on the right hand side on a projects' page (e.g., SETI@home) :-)

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dutch (61) · 7 years ago

More stats for superblocks: projects included (sometimes not all of them are)

This already exists under the projects tab.

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nightshift1134 (52) · 7 years ago

When you look up [lets say your personal cpid] a better graph/statistics of your rsa cause it changes with every SB like if my mag drops by half one day and says estimated owed 20 but the day befeore was estimated owed 30. If its possible that would be nice.

And i dont know if its possible or gridcoinstats place but a screen saver that can show what exactly your pc is working on so you can see how your helping science

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sc-steemit (64) · 7 years ago

The new page will not tie RSA updates together with SB generation, but will be with constant intervals instead. It will make the estimations less changing. And I will look in making the stats graphs in another way.

Regarding screensavers. I'm not going to put work in making one, that's way out of my field. However, if anyone is interesting to make one I can supply the necessary API calls for it. It sounds like a cool idea 😎

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