There was recently a discussion on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/gridcoin/comments/7qre20/moo_wrapper_is_this_a_scientific_project/) about the scientific aspects of Moo Wrapper, which is the BOINC-version of the RC5-72 challenge. This discussion led to the current poll on the question, whether Moo Wrapper should be removed from the whitelist. In this point I want to bring out some of my points on why we should not remove it from the whitelist. Nevertheless, I agree that the scientific merits of this bruteforcing of a key is not large.

As I gather, the main point of the RC5-72 challenge is to brute force open a specific 72-bit RC5 key. (more on RC5 here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RC5). This challenge originally runs on the distributed.net-client, which is apparently a similar distributed processing program as BOINC. Moo Wrapper just links BOINC to this project. The challenge was issued by RSA Labs in 2002, and they offer a total of $10 000 prize for solving the key, distributed as follows:

$1000 to the winner $1000 to the winner's team (or to the winner if not on a team) $6000 to a non-profit organization chosen by all participants $2000 to distributed.net for building the network and supplying the code

Although the brute forced key is not very scientific, I think that the process of brute forcing it open using distributed processing ecosystem is, to some extent. Building the client, optimizing the process and linking it all to other programs like BOINC all have some value to them. The process also generates data about which hardware, setups and work package length work best. A clear goal helps coders to focus their work.

According to the stats at http://stats.distributed.net/projects.php?project_id=8, grcpool is the overall fastest cruncher, having 3x blocks per day compared to the next participant. This corresponds to ~13.5% of the total keyrate, just for the pool. The keyrate has doubled since gridcoin was introduced, so I think team gridcoin could easily have 20-50% contribution to the project. The prize money would of course be a nice bonus for gridcoin and/or the pool if we solve it, which could be used for development. Of course, finding the correct key could take tens of years, the max of 132 years (with current speed), or it could be tomorrow.

One aspect that has not been considered that much, is that solving such a hard key would be a historical achievement, which could give gridcoin some nice publicity. We need publicity to grow.

Also, I think its very hard for an average (or even a non-average) gridcoin user to really have the knowledge to decide if a project is "scientific" enough. Delisting Moo Wrapper for being unscientific would mean that being whitelisted is susceptible to the whims of the voters, who may or may not have enough knowledge about the scientific aspects of each project. I think whitelisting should be based on aspects like reliability and technical aspects.

I hope that people will vote for this project to stay in the whitelist. Also a wide discussion and decision about white- or blacklisting needs to be done, to have some consistency about the projects we crunch. I think some good arguments are presented here: https://steemit.com/gridcoin/@nateonthenet/why-gridcoin-whitelisting-must-go

Cryptography is not my field (I'm a PhD researcher in Space Physics myself), so please correct me if I have something wrong.

Happy computing!