Gridcoin 4.0-2018 General Roadmap Poll - Receiving Earned Research Rewards

This is the description and thread for the Gridcoin 4.0-2018 General Roadmap Poll pertaining to how Gridcoin users receive their earned research rewards. You can find the Cryptocurrency Talk thread, which contains information on all polls, here. Any questions asked on this thread should relate only to this poll. Any questions on the Cryptocurrency Talk thread that are related to this poll will be relayed here and vice versa. Please, do not be afraid to ask questions. We want to make sure that everyone understands what they are voting on.

You can find the poll on Gridcoinstats here.

The poll was made by @tomasbrod with address: SFhy5MRyNqVcC2pCtEYeMSULe6wA5SPYMk.

Earned Research Rewards (ERR) are the rewards a user has earned for crunching work units for BOINC projects. Currently, there is one way for a user to receive their ERR. They receive their ERR when they stake a block on the Gridcoin blockchain. As mentioned in the article covering poll #3, a user’s balance is the main variable that determines how likely a user is to stake a block. In other words, a user with a high balance is more likely to stake a block than a user with a low balance. For many users it is effectively impossible to stake a block and receive their ERR in a reasonable amount of time. This forces them to join a pool. When a user joins a pool, they lose all their BOINC stats and they cannot use their magnitude to vote in the Gridcoin client. There have been two ideas put forward that would allow non-staking balance users to be solo miners but still receive their ERR.

Manual ERR Claims (MERRC)

Manual ERR Claims intends to provide an alternative to receiving ERR through staking. Additionally, MERRC adds an economic tool to the Gridcoin ecosystem in the form of Manual Claim Fees.

MERRC works much like the rewards claiming of steemit. At any time, a user would have the option to manually claim their ERR in an upcoming block. This claim system would function as an alternative to standard staking and pools, which would remain unaffected. To prevent spam, a fee similar to a transaction fee would be required to manually claim your rewards. This is the Manual Claim Fee (MCF).

It is possible, though not immediately necessary, to distribute MCFs to an array of entities such as stakers, the GRC Foundation, Gridcoin development bounties and projects, BOINC projects, charities, relief efforts, causes and crowdsourcing. MCFs could also be used as an economic tool, for instance they could be burned to control inflation. There would need to be an extended conversation if we decide to develop MERRC in order to determine a future path. For simplicity of implementation it might make most sense to treat MCFs as transactions fees, fees that are added to blocks as rewards for staking.

More information on using MCF as a source of funding can be found here

Superblock Payouts

Another alternative is to pay all users with a ERR value greater than 5 in each daily superblock. The upsides are frequent payouts for everyone, including new users. On the downside, there is no incentive to hold mined coins. The large volume of transactions would also mean that the block size limit would likely have to be lifted for the size of these superblocks.

"Do you think we need a way other than staking a block for users to receive their earned research rewards?"

-Yes, focus on superblock payout

-Yes, focus on Manual ERR Claims

-Yes, I support exploring both options

-Yes, but I do not like either of these options

-No

-Need more information

-Abstain