“Every day our processors contribute over three years worth of CPU time to solving distributed computing cancer research work units.” — John, BOID
Introducing BOID
EOS projects have exploded in recent months, as many on the gambling side were aware. Yet there is a handful that are very particular in what they want to achieve. BOID is one such project that focuses on “harnessing” the CPU power of idle computers and applying the CPU power towards solving mathematical and algorithmic calculations. Mapping the way by solving Cancer Marker, ( A tumor or Cancer marker is a biomarker found in blood, urine, or body tissues that can be elevated by the presence of one or more types of cancer. Mapping Cancer markers aims to identify the markers associated with various types of cancer & how they eventuate.) equations is a perfect example. The GenerEOS Team wish to thank John for joining us and sharing a little more in depth about BOID.
Richie M — GenerEOS
Hello John of BOID, how are you? Thank you for your time. BOID is definitely a word that grabs peoples attention. Can you explain what BOID stands for?
John — BOID
Hi, I’m doing great thanks Richie. The word BOID is short for bird-oid and was coined in the 80s by a computer scientist (Craig Reynolds) to describe a flocking algorithm that he developed. The algorithm simulates a complex flock of entities without any central form of coordination. Each “BOID” in the flock follows a simple set of rules interacting with its closest neighbors. When you place many of these simple entities in one space, you can see complex emergent flocking patterns. Similarly, the BOID network is comprised of many users who each make a small contribution to a large vision.
Richie M — GenerEOS
What type of career background do you come from John?
John — BOID
I come from a background in the video-games industry where I was a technical director. Basically, I was responsible for bridging the gap between the art and technical teams and was often responsible for tasks that didn’t fit cleanly into a specific category. My experience translating ideas between technical and non-technical teams gives me a unique perspective in the blockchain space and helps to inform the way that I design BOID.
Richie M — GenerEOS
Being able to translate Technical into a more understandable language for people is a great feat! How did you come about the idea of BOID? Were there some past ideas that melted into this project or based on previous experience in your career?
John — BOID
In 2016 I built a multi-miner app as part of the Alchemist Accelerator in the Bay Area. The lessons learned from that project and many other prototypes all inform the design decisions made for BOID. The emphasis on the social aspects of the platform comes from my observations from previous apps where users were more concerned with their rankings vs other users than they were with their direct profitability.
Richie M — GenerEOS
BOID is definitely set as a long term project. BOID is an EOS sidechain, has there been ideas or plans to move onto other blockchain networks?
John — BOID
We chose EOS because I think it’s the only socially scalable blockchain available today. Since BOID is targeting mass adoption, EOS makes for a perfect fit. While our original plans for Boid is implemented as a native sidechain, recent developments from Liquidapps like vRAM and vCPU means that we can operate on mainnet for the foreseeable future. We are waiting for proper IBC maturity before we decide on the final technical architecture.
Richie M — GenerEOS
Having a project such as BOID would require a strong support network. I hear that your team resides mainly in the US, around 9 people including yourself and advisors. Can you tell us more about your team and how long you have been working together for?
John — BOID
I started building BOID alone part-time during 2017. Once I launched the closed alpha in early 2018, it was restricted to a small group. I started to reach out to try and expand my team but I had difficulty attracting the right talent without a large budget. The BOID team has actually grown organically from the BOID community. I found that when you build something that people are passionate about, then the right people will find you.
Today my team consists of the following.
Daniel Carroll — Community/Marketing lead: Business owner in the XRP ecosystem with a strong marketing background.
Eric Solomon — Technical Lead: Aerospace engineer with a background in technical leadership.
Luke Dickerson — Engineer: Mechanical engineer and machine learning expert.
Jamie Cupper — R&D: Dev-ops and Blockchain expert on the founding teams of many DPOS chains.
Richie M — GenerEOS
Your Team sounds really well balanced and experienced. With a lot of computing power at stake, what kind of projects are open or will be open for use when people sign up? Are there certain criteria that must be met?
John — BOID
Distributed computing is most commonly used for projects where the datasets and code is not proprietary and is open source and easily audited. The reason for this is because it’s difficult to guarantee that the data in a “work unit” is not leaked when distributed to arbitrary computers on the internet. For this reason, the BOID platform is focused on a niche around scientific computing and machine learning. As the platform matures then it will be more accessible to more broad use cases.
Richie M — GenerEOS
Will developers be able to harness BOID and connect or upload their “problems or equations” to BOID so people can help solve them?
John — BOID
Currently, when users run the BOID app they are contributing computing resources towards a long-running distributed science project operated by IBM called World Community Grid. Currently, we are working with some partners on our own proprietary distributed science projects which we hope to roll out to Boid users later this year. Distributed computing brings with it many strengths and weaknesses and for that reason, Boid is not designed to be a general computing platform
Richie M — GenerEOS
Having experienced BOID and downloaded the Desktop version, I was ecstatic to be able to contribute my CPU to then help solve the Mapping of Cancer Markers.
Your website is quite colourful and explains things easily, even for normal everyday people. How many users are you aiming for vs a certain timeline?
John — BOID
The BOID app is designed to be accessible to everyone. It’s difficult for me to project the growth of our user base, but I can say that we will soon be expanding our marketing efforts outside of the cryptocurrency space. Our next target market is online PC gaming communities.
Richie M — GenerEOS
From your perspective, do you have any interesting facts based on CPU usage or anything that might paint a picture for our readers? What are the percentages in payouts, understanding this might change over time?
John — BOID
Currently we mint around 1m BOID per day and these tokens are paid out to nearly 700 active users who contribute their computing resources. That means around 260m BOID has been paid out to users since Boid launched in August. The Boid app has been installed on over 3500 computers and the average computing power contributed is greater than 13000 teraflops of CPU + GPU processing power. Every day our processors contribute over three years worth of CPU time to solving distributed computing cancer research work-units.
Richie M — GenerEOS
Is there anything you might be able to share with us that’s upcoming in the short term future?
John — BOID
BOID season 0 ends on April 7th. Season 1 starts April 21st. During the season break, BOID staking will be unlocked. Users can lock in their BOID stake for the season to improve their profitability. During the season break, we will be announcing details about the first BOID NFTs that users can collect.
Richie M — GenerEOS
Collectible NFT’s sounds fantastic! (Non-Fungible Tokens are tokens that represent something that’s unique & different. Same rule as sand on a beach, each grain or token is distinct in it’s own right or purpose. NFT’s are not interchangeable also.) Will they be seasonal or can’t you say to much just yet?
John — BOID
Seasonal, collectible and rare! That’s all I can say for now!
Richie M — GenerEOS
What are your thoughts or views on the EOS referendums?
John — BOID
I think it’s a great way to poll the community and let people put their money where their mouth is. Because it’s pure token weight, it’s going to have a bias towards more wealthy users, but I think the voter proxies can help to even things out. I still think some kind of sybil-resistant polling system that has an identity solution like Lumeos is very valuable. We have our own Voter Proxyalso.
Richie M — GenerEOS
From all of us at GenerEOS we would like to Thank John for his time in this interview. It has been a pleasure in being able to have these questions answered, let alone being able to ask them. We wish BOID the best and cannot wait to see more from the team!
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