How is it verified? I thought the problem with doing useful work instead of normal PoW was that producing and verifying are equally hard, while Bitcoin's PoW scheme is hard to produce but easy to verify (so other miners can easily see that you've actually found the hash without doing any computations themselves).
It uses Proof-of-stake and not Proof-of-work to secure the block chain.
Additionally it has a Proof-Of-Research layer on top that reward the scientific research processing.
Each whitelisted project gets its chare of a set amount of Gridcoins that in minted and distributed to the individual contributors.
The amount is currently distributed equally across whitelisted project. So more project the less will be given to a potentially fraudulent project.
How each project verify the tasks is more or less up to the project to handle. The individual Boinc project has incentives to do this as they use the result in their scientific report (falls result will be bad for them).
One solution to this problem is to have multiple crunchers do the same task and compare results, if the tasks is distributed randomly then an increase in the number of equal tasks can be used to increase confidence in the result. Eg a monte carlo simulation can be bone multiple times and the result can be compared, if it is within a given threshold. (this part is the responsibility of the individual project)
Other tasks might have hard to compute result that are easy to verify for the host similar to Prof-Of-Work on other blockchains.
More Boinc project will help to decentralize the reward, limit the risk of running out of research to do, and if one malicious project by chance get whitelisted then the impact will be limited.
The contributors contribution to each project is gathers by Oracles that compares their findings and this result is committed to the superblock.
Decentralized trust on Bitcoin is an illusion in practicality. There are trust bottlenecks all over the place when most people go to use it.
It’s ultimately a quixotic goal. So compromising a bit on mathematical decentralized trustlessness to accomplish some of the other goals of cryptocurrency while addressing the massive waste is a valid goal IMHO.
It depends on out-of-loop review of the oracles by people, to ensure they stay honest, and that new oracles are honest.
Over time, as problems come and go, I assume oracles will be added and retired, so this coin will require manual maintenance. A necessary cost of being interesting?
