I think a project ranking system may be the way to go. Perhaps it is better than a tier system since we could score projects on a variety of different criteria and then generate some type of aggregate score. We could, for example, have the community vote on specific criteria for each project and then generate a ranking. These criteria could reflect science (for example, publication output), Work unit availability, popularity (# of active hosts), security/stats updates, GPU/CPU inclusion, area of focus/benefit to humanity etc. Based on these metrics an aggregate score could then be used to generate a ranking so that top performing projects receive a greater share of newly minted GRC.
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This is definitely an improvement over the current system, in fact, it may even be the optimal solution. Some concerns of mine are:
What happens to new users who want to participate, but think disagree with the current ranking? Will there be regular voting?
Is there a way we could include smaller, short-term projects?
It doesn't address the incentive problem. However, what you just described would definitely reduce it, maybe to the point of irrelevance, as I pointed out in the original post.
The question is, how centralized do we want the reward mechanism to be? The last suggestion in my post is completely decentralized, as the top-ranked projects would just be the most crunched. On the other hand, I share the concerns of @jringo (and you, I think) that there are projects that are more worthy of being crunched than others.
Regular voting seems like it would be a necessity in order to keep up with new projects/retiring old projects. I think once every 3 - 6 months would be a decent time frame.
That's a good point regarding centralization. From the ranking, maybe there could still be tiers to include the top projects so that within a single tier, no project is treated any better than another. For example, Tier 1 could consist of the top 10 projects and be given 50% of all newly minted GRC. Tier 2 could consist of the next 10-20 projects and be given 35% of all newly minted GRC. A third Tier could consist of the remaining projects and be given the remaining share of GRC*
*All numbers are examples only
This would make monopolization difficult since one would need to dominate the entire 1st Tier of projects.
The current magnitude distribution is highly centralized, and it can cause users on very popular projects like SETI@home to lose potential magnitude by crunching a project they prefer less. The question is, is it fair that some users are receiving more for the same hardware ~= energy costs than other users? I think eliminating this incentive entirely by a direct FLOP -> Magnitude distribution that @jringo mentioned above would make the process a lot cleaner.
Can we can predict how this would incentivize people to move to higher tiered or lower tiered projects? I think it would depend on the input in either direction, which can vary over time. The more finely tiered the ranking, the less important this becomes, like taking a Riemman sum with smaller and smaller widths, converging to less overlap (in positive or negative directions) with the actual curve. The more finely grained, the more decentralized. We hit a stopping point when we finely grain to the point where each tier has only one project in it - a singleton tier - i.e., all projects are ranked in order, not in tiers. This system would have the lowest amount of centralization, assuming we can't chop projects up into pieces*. What we have right now is the exact opposite - all projects are in the same tier => they all carry equal magnitude.
There is a good argument for centralization that benefits particular projects more than others. However, even this tiered system is not guaranteed to prevent incentivizing users to point IPP to another, lower tiered project.
*if we can implement the FLOPS -> magnitude distribution, accounting for different hardware, then this is possible. Since you mentioned treating projects in each tier equally, I think this would be a good way to do it. If we make the entire distribution decentralized, i.e. normalize all performance - it is possible the incentive problem disappears (I think).
All that said, this would overall be less centralized than the current distribution, it would benefit many more users that like to crunch more popular projects, and it leaves room for more decentralization.
Which is exactly against the interests of any such organization.