You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Opinion: Incentivising BOINC
I'm not sure you will see some miracle breakthrough. More like incremental increases in knowledge that ultimately help lead to new things. einstein@home HAS discovered numerous pulsars for what that's worth. It isn't clear to me what benefit protein folding simulations and other biology related projects like rosetta@home and World Community Grid has produced but I wouldn't presume the work has been worthless just because there hasn't been a new miracle drug. Seti@home hasn't found anything but then that one always has been and always will be a long shot.
Crunching costs money. And I doubt that donating to present day boinc project is a most effective way to donate.
Even if the alternative is feeding the dog at your door.
Or buying SP and donating upvotes to steem app developers.
I can't give you a cost/benefit comparison with other approaches of conducting research projects but the reality is that worldwide millions of people are spending billions of dollars that don't deliver any direct scientific breakthrough either.
As @darth-cryptic has mentioned above research is "incremental increases in knowledge that ultimately help lead to new things".
The difficulty with research is that there is no silver bullet to quickly fix something. In the past 20 years well over a billion dollars yearly has come from charitable donations for cancer research and still we haven't found a break-through to prevent it from happening. Should we now stop it or continue and take the knowlegde of all research results world-wide (including BOINC) to further work on a final solution?
Finally, I agree that feeding the dog or buying SP to donate upvotes to steem app developers are other ways of spending your money and fortunately everybody can decide how they feel it is spent best.