A few things happened since the last update of the experiment. Gridcoin price has been soaring, increasing by as much as 50%. Just to drop 30% today. There was also a lot of commotion about pomegranate. And @dutch got active again on steemit. Three separate occurrences that relate to the experiment

#### Purpose of the experiment
I continue this experiment because it provides interesting *facts*. The ones who are very involved in gridcoin know that RAC can change and is not predictable for various reasons. This experiment shows this with real life data and can help newcomers by example to see how complex gridcoin mining is and give experience users some data to look at and confirm their understanding and insights.

This data is gathered on a virtualized Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard x64 Edition running on a Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 0 @ 2.30GHz [Family 6 Model 45 Stepping 7] core with 4GB of RAM. The computing preferences are set to use at most 50% of the cores at 100% of the time.

#### Pomegranate
I have been BOINCing for over a decade, long before crypto's and Gridcoin existed. And I will continue if it all turns out to be a bubble an ceases to exist. I do it for science first and some GRC peanuts second. There are of course others and where there's money to be made there will always be a variety of interests. Just a reminder from the BOINC website. BOINC was set up as Open-source software for volunteer computing. The initial idea is to use the idle time on your computer to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research. In the course of history teams emerged 'competing' with each other. All kind of enthusiasts got involved. But no-one would come to the idea of abusing it because it was in no-one's interest.

Gridcoin changes this. Let me stress that I'm not expressing an opinion on pomegranate or Charity Engine. There is enough information available for you to make your own opinion. The fact is however that this commotion showed that BOINC was not designed for making money out of it. From a projects point of view they receive computing power and are free to use it as they see fit. As a volunteer you choose what to give your computing power to. Because Gridcoin now enables one to make money out of that 'volunteering' the door is open to abuse. What might and will happen is that someone or something will try to abuse the system for their own profit. Mining malware exists and it's not unthinkable this will happen with Gridcoin as well. How BOINC and it's projects will handle this 'unintended volunteering' from malicious sources will be interesting to follow.

#### Host normalization

The bright side of this pomegranate saga is that @dutch resurfaced and I was able to have some quick words with him. This learned me that the decrease in RAC that can be observed in the experiment might be related to either pomegranate starting crunching on VGTU and/or @dutch himself moving his cluster to VGTU which might have happened around the beginning of the decrease. Too bad I have no data so we can't correlate.

Previously I had the idea of correlating it with the team RAC. I am now starting to track the RAC of the top 10 BOINC users on VGTU to expand on that. More data never hurts.

#### Evolution
The points awarded and RAC have been quite stable for a while now. That's a good base to work start from if anything were to change. Since I now track the top 10 I'm hoping to see signs of host normalization. For now I need to wait for a big change to happen. For the miners it's obvious that GRC price has a big influence and is unpredictable.

<center>![overview.PNG](https://res.cloudinary.com/hpiynhbhq/image/upload/v1513936413/m8ehppjx2bpnp0691ili.png)
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<center>![Magnitude.PNG](https://res.cloudinary.com/hpiynhbhq/image/upload/v1513936427/huquxwsbielvoyscim70.png)
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This post has most info about the first chart: [The RAC experiment progress and request for help](https://steemit.com/gridcoin/@jefpatat/the-rac-experiment-progress-and-request-for-help)
This post has the motivation for the second chart: [The RAC experiment continues](https://steemit.com/gridcoin/@jefpatat/the-rac-experiment-continues)

<br /><hr/><em>Posted on <a href="https://utopian.io/utopian-io/@jefpatat/the-gridcoin-mining-experiment-grc-price-influence-pomegranate-and-more">Utopian.io -  Rewarding Open Source Contributors</a></em><hr/>