I've searched the last pages of this huge thread but I couldn't find any reference to Gridcoin or Boinc.
This project seems very similar to the Gridcoin which I'm currently supporting with my CPU while my GPUs are mining.
Elastic seems to be built from the bottom for what it does though, while Gridcoin was just attached to another platform which was running before the blockchain technology (16 years now to be precise).
Is there any other reason that Elastic is better than BOINC? Maybe the two of them are different in many ways and I'm just missing something?
https://talk.elasticexplorer.org/t/elastic-compared-to-other-competitors/30"The problem with this approach is the involvement of a central authority. The distribution of Gridcoins (GRC) can be tampered arbitrarily the moment an attacker gains access to the centralized service. Also, the existence of Gridcoin depends on the existence of BOINC. If the latter service dies, so does Gridcoin unless an update is rolled out which moves the Proof-of-Research mechanism to a different service.
In Elastic, we do not have such problems: we do not rely on any other third party service and neither do we depend the payout process on any kind of external (not tamper proof) factors. Instead, the measurement of the amount of computational contribution as well as the payout process is done entirely in the protocol itself."
Thanks for the info. I'm afraid of that exact issue with BOINC. However it's much easier to use than XEL is... or at least seems to be. I read the instructions today and though I understood what I had to do, it was a lot of trouble!