RE: The top50 GRC addresses own 48% of all Gridcoins
I don't really get what your key point is. The current reward mechanism? The previous reward mechanisms? The low price?
Gridcoin is around since the end of 2013. Back then it was a proof of work coin wich also rewarded some GRC for doing BOINC. Then it switched to PoS in 2015. The coins were transformed to the new blockchain in a proof of burn process. I think for 1 old GRC you got 10 new GRC coins. (or something like that) After the switch there was a rather quick reduction of BOINC rewards until it reached the current amounts.
Have there been mistakes in the past with the reward mechanism and the switch to the new blockchain? Probabily. But if you started today to mine BTC you also will never reach the amounts people mined in 2009. (Or bought bitcoin at that time)
And there probably are long term Gridcoin participants that managed to accumulate alot of gridcoins in the past 3 and a half years.
Can we improve the reward mechanism? I believe yes. So lets focus on that. And that includes switching from a interest rate to a fixed block reward.
But I think what is more important, is to get a Gridcoin economy going. For example giving an incentive to burn Gridcoins. The problem Gridcoin has in comparison to Bitcoin is that it has no fintie number of coins. I beliefe this is necessary to keep up the incentive to participate in BOINC but we also have to think of ways to reduce the coin supply. We don't want Gridcoin to become a kind of "tradable BOINC credit", it should also be a store of value. I think what we want is some kind of balance between coin creation and growing interest/coin burning. Being able to pay for the electricity costs with your reward should be our goal. And keeping it that way in the future.
I don't think that is possible with increasing the rewards because new users feel like they will never be able to have as many coins as the early adopters.
If we dilute the value of Gridcoin too much by increasing the rewards we will not encourage people to participate in BOINC. We have to think in FIAT currency here, otherwise its nothing more than tradable, decentralized BOINC credits.
I agree, focusing on encouraging people to BOINC is the entire point of the coin - that should be the focus. Anything that doesn't do that is anti-GRC. But, of course, the people that control the votes now (unless we just do it by address or CPID count) are the investors not the BOINCers.
Investors can be researchers too, they may just keep their big pile offline for security
It would - theoretically - show up as a linked account on the block explorer...maybe...
Yeah maybe, maybe not. If you cycled the coins through a couple of exchanges/other cryptos it might get obfuscated. Im not saying there arent just some big whale investors, thats the obvious evidence, but we cant know they arent researchers too.