Crowd Funding Science Through Cryptocurrency

Can Cryptocurrency Do What Grants and Donations Can't?

I recently decided to expand my digital money foot print by Dipping My Toe Into Cryptotrading. I transferred a few Steem Dollars (SBD) over to Bittrex exchange and bought some cheap alt-coins. After I posted the article, I went back and decided to go ahead and purchase one coin, even though I couldn't afford much of it.

I purchased 20 Einsteinium coins. The reason I decided to purchase was due to the increase of price over the last few days.

Obviously I should have gotten in before October.

I noticed on their website that they were having a hard fork in a couple of weeks. This hard fork date was set back on October 22 to be on December 9th. With my experience with other hard forks, there is usually an increase in value up to the date of the hard fork, and depending on how things go, the value will drop a little and then go up again. I hope to ride the wave up and sell at a good price way above what I bought it at. Another possibility, I might hang on to it and keep riding its success.

There was also something about burning a lot of the coins, which I can't seem to find again. Reducing the supply should increase the value of the coins.

What is Einsteinium

The mission of Einsteinium

The Einsteinium Foundation’s mission is to raise funds for scientific research. Our mining tax creates a pool of funds that provide grants to deserving applicants.

The do this by taking some of the coins created and putting them into a foundation to make donations to scientific research.

EMC2 automatically donates 2% of every block mined to the Foundation Fund to be used for donations. The mining of Einsteinium is divided into Epochs: each Epoch mines 36000 blocks of coins and is targeted to last approximately 25 days. Every 25 days, at the end of each Epoch, a new ground breaking scientific cause is selected to receive Einsteinium Foundation funding.

The number of coins are limited, which is a good thing.

Einsteinium coin uses a proof of work script algorithm that will have a total of 299 million coins. 2.5% of each block will go to the Einsteinium Foundation with 2% to be given to science projects and .5% going towards faucets, donations, and marketing costs.

The first project funded

Indigogo page
Science Study: Memory Loss DueTo Sleep Deprivation
Dr. Robbert Havekes, PhD is a research scientist associated with the University of Pennsylvania.

The Einsteinium Foundation [EMC2] is the organizer for this campaign. We recently awarded Dr. Havekes a grant for his work in this 'sleep deprivation impact on memory loss' study. EMC2 is a non-profit cryptocurrency community who fund science research, education, and development.

According to their site, they have given 16m Einsteinium coins, but since I only see on project, they all must have gone to that one project. If the research had kept those coins, priced at $0.0001 back in 2015, until today, they would be worth a lot more than $16,000, they would be closer to $8,000,000. But, since the project had a funding of only $700, they must not have been given all of those coins.

Back to the original question, can cryptocurrency fund scientific research?

By taking a 2% tax from mining, there is a possibility that the coin could provide a significant amount of coins towards the fund. But, that depends on how many coins are mined. If the researcher given the coins holds on to them, then they have a better chance of increasing their fund balance. But, this would only work for a project that had planned for many years of study or development. I would assume that most studies looking for simple funding wouldn't have a long road map, so they would have to cash in the coins immediately in order to buy equipment and pay workers.

I think the only real possibility is that the coins are put into a fund and then a percentage of that fund is set aside each year to be donated to a project. The project would still have to get the majority of its funding in order to operate and the cryptocurrency would be added bonus for unexpected costs. Or possibly, the project could use the cryptocurrency to get started and attract larger donations based off of the progress made with the initial small funding. There are probably numerous people looking to do studies that would not be given a first glance by the scientific community and I guess that's probably where this would find the best usage.

On a side note, I did notice that there were several articles on people using different cryptocurrencies to fund this and that science initiative. I would assume, that in the future, these coins should merge into a single effort to fund crowd voted on research projects. Of course, I see issues in that as well, but when there are so many cryptocurrencies out there, there is bound to be consolidation.

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Let the positive energy sing!

More Power to the Minnows!!