Quickmag Options

[makeasnek]

If we want to bounty a quickmag replacement, we need to decide how to structure such a replacement. Here are three ideas, ordered by expected complexity and cost.

Option 1 : Website replacement
A website could be coded to mimic the existing quickmag website. It could ingest the stats on its own or use the existing Quickmag backend code. This requires identifying a party who would willingly host the data. This is by far the cheapest option if we rule out the possibility of DDoS attacks.

Pros:

• Simple drop-in replacement for previous quickmag
• Easy for any user to access

Cons:

• Not resistant to DDoS attacks

Option 2: Desktop Client for Estimation

Pros:

• Offers more DDoS resistance

Cons:

• More difficult for end user, requires additional code for cross-platform support.

Option 3: Full Wallet Integration
This is essentially the same as option 2, but would wrap the desktop application into something that the wallet can access & display stats from.

Pros:

• Easy to use, but not as easy to use as website
• DDoS resistant
• If this feature was integrated into the wallet (which tends to be regularly online for staking), we can possibly set seeding by default to a certain ratio to help distribute load. Clients essentially already do this by seeding blockchain data, we are just adding a layer on top of that for clients who use the quickmag feature.

Cons:

• C++ code requirement means higher development cost
• Gridcoin may be uncomfortable with this, as it may imply that Gridcoin is saying you will earn x and users may be upset if they only earn some amount <x.

Notes: Data distribution
Options 2 and 3 would require that the desktop clients somehow be able to access the stats from the BOINC projects. This cannot be done in the form of directly downloading the stats from the projects since this will hammer the projects and result in them taking stats offline. For this reason, we would need to have a centralized service download the stats and either publish the stats in full or publish an abbreviated version of the stats.

• Making them available via regular web download opens DDoS opportunities.
• We could publish via IPFS or BitTorrent, but doing so requires more complexity on the client-side to run a torrent client. Additionally, most clients would hit-and-run with downloads (and not seed) leaving us in a situation of having to somehow provide bandwidth to those seeds.
• One pro of making the full stats available via BitTorrent or IPFS is that it is a service to the BOINC network which can enhance SCIs relationship with the BOINC network.

Related: First draft of original idea for this TheSCInitiative/bounties#14