Cash Prizes = Good or bad?

[sophiazz]

It appears the previous topic was removed. (I hope it is ok that I restart the topic; If not please PM me the reason why the other was removed)

Do you think that the cash prizes that organizations use to promote Folding@Home (for participation) are effective, ineffective, good, bad, or other?

[PantherX]

Welcome to the F@H Forum sophiazz,

Please note that I am unable to find any record of deletion of any posts from your account. I assume it might have been a glitch somewhere which resulted in a lost post. We are an agnostic forum and as long as participants in the forum follow the rules (viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15), there won't be any issue

[Neil-B]

For me cash prizes are not necessary and not relevant .. for others I am sure they are .. if people have issues with fahclient, fahcores, etc. I am able to help where I can but issues with accounts/rewards offered by bodies that offer such aren't something I know about or could help with .. for me such rewards are a bit like points - I recognise that for some people they are important and really matter but as far as I am concerned they are at most a metric I can use to monitor my kit (at worst they cause more stress, arguments and upset than I think is necessary)

[gunnarre]

Cash prizes or efforts like Curecoin might incentivize folding, but it could also incentivize cheating (like running it without permission, or running hacked clients) and submitting bad data to earn points. That should be avoided for the sake of the integrity of the data and the project. As long as a cash prize is offered not based on points, but perhaps as a random draw among participants, that shouldn't be a problem. I have nothing against Curecoin, by the way, but I'm wary of actually making it profitable to compute without additional checks.

[Burlingtonian]

Cash prizes do not appeal to me and seem to contradict the whole idea of what it means to simply be a donor. The occasional acknowledgement of milestones reached makes more sense and I suspect would be well received.

[PantherX]

...submitting bad data to earn points...

Invalid data results in zero points. If you could theoretically submit invalid data that passes all the sanity checks on the client and Server, that's a PhD worthy paper since you would be by-passing the current known laws of nature

Having said that, DDOS attacks on Servers is a possibility to cause loss of points. You also have cherry-picking (dumping WUs that don't yield high points) which does hurt science and can cost months of researcher's valuable time.