I'm happy knowing I haven't "bought" my badges :) All my finds were mine, with my hardware.

This is the part I simply don't understand. Every prime I have. Every badge I have. Every credit I have. I have "bought".

With real money. With MY money. A tiny, miniscule fraction of a percent of that was spent on cloud servers. The rest was my equipment on my electric bill.

I fail to see why it's different if my purchase was for CPUs and disk drives and electricity directly, or indirectly by renting the hardware instead of purchasing it? Either way, how much computing power I have available is a function of my willingness to spend my money on computing. It's always been about "buying primes", even long before cloud computing existed. The people with the big wallets generally have an advantage in... well, everything. BOINC is no exception.

Is that fair? Certainly not. Do I like it? Not one bit. Do I think cloud computing changes the equation? Well, yes it does.

I think it makes it fairer for the little guys, giving them a chance to, for a few days, operate at a higher level than they could otherwise. It levels the playing field.

My imagination is rather limited, and the only reasons I can think of for opposing making the "game" fairer and more fun for everyone are rather uncharitable, so I'd prefer to hear your reasons instead.

Most importantly, however, let's look away from the self-centered viewpoint of "how does it affect me?" BOINC isn't about us. It's about us helping scientists with their computing needs. Without a doubt, cloud computing adds a lot of computing power to what's available to BOINC projects to get done what they're trying to achieve, whether it's finding primes or curing cancer.

The amount of GFN-16 being done continues to be unprecedented. The first GFN-16 prime of TdP 2023 had a b of 186 million. We're currently above 241 million. That's an increase of 55 million in less than 23 days. By contrast, it took 10 years to do the first 55 million in the project. In fact, we were at b=55 million only 3 years ago

I guess that's thanks to cloud computing.

There is this perception out there that 99.999999999999% of our computing is being done by bogymen running phantom virtual cloud computers in orbit around Venus. Or something just as silly.

Yes, cloud computing is a thing, and for ONE DAY (the Mountain Stage) it was actually a big thing, but most of the time it's a relatively small presence. People aren't en-masse deciding to take out a second mortgage to either buy more computers, or to rent a bunch of computers. Certainly not for a whole month. For a day, it's fun. For a month, it's real money.

To help set perceptions straight, it should also be noted that even on that one day the majority of primes was not found by cloud computers - unlike in last year's Mountain Stage!

In addition to the advances in software and hardware leading to the massive leading edge advance this month, GFN-16 was also just not all that "interesting" in the past: Yes, it has been the most promising option for finding a Top5k prime on a GPU for several years, but there were much more attractive options on CPU until recently (PPSE until last year's TdP, PPS and MEGA until fast DC was introduced for GFN a few months ago). In all the years since it was migrated from PRPNet to BOINC, there was only one GFN-16 challenge (Pierre de Fermat's Birthday Challenge in November 2017) and that was together with GFN-15 and GFN-17-Low (which, according to my notes, were more efficient in terms of points per run time during that challenge). Finally, all GFN subprojects count towards the same badge, so the badge hunters also had no particular reason to crunch GFN-16.

The amount of GFN-16 being done continues to be unprecedented. The first GFN-16 prime of TdP 2023 had a b of 186 million. We're currently above 241 million. That's an increase of 55 million in less than 23 days. By contrast, it took 10 years to do the first 55 million in the project. In fact, we were at b=55 million only 3 years ago