The moral dilemma of Gridcoin
I've been know to over think things and this might have been one of those times; and I'm comfortable with my choice now.
Several years ago I was on the Boinc system crunching numbers mostly for the World Community Grid before Gridcoin became apart of it. (I may have just sounded like a hipster)
Now that Gridcoin presented itself my first instil was to challenge myself, and it with figuring out the best way to make a profit. When I reach the point of partial understanding how to do that I picked projects with what I considered the best returns.
Then I was sitting around last night considering it, and wondering what the Solar Panel team is up to now that their project is done. Which had me wondering just how far along the Cancer project of children was doing; so I went and looked.
The Cancer for Children is sitting at 100 percent but the Cancer markers is just above 60.
There's more work to be done in the health fields while my computer is trying to figure out mathematical equations.
Several weeks ago my friend Stephanie passed away from Breast Cancer, something she was diagnosed with st the age of 31. She was give a 6% chance of living another six months but being the person she was she lived another eleven years.
What she decided was that she was going to be upbeat and attempt every new advantage that science gave her. New treatments, she was there. New medicine she would volunteer. For eleven years she would go into remission and then Cancer would come back.
Science kept her alive but it was always a race. Always trying to keep ahead of her Cancer.
Then Cancer won the race. It became more aggressive than the new treatments.
Science lost, and it lost because it couldn't keep up.
So at eleven last night I switched all my computers from math to World Community Grid, to GPUgrind and Tg. I may not make as much, but I'm hoping my part is a slight boost of steroids to Science. 
My condolences. I have never had a friend pass away from cancer, so I can't imagine how difficult that is. Maybe I'm too young to have had such experiences, or maybe I'm just lucky.
To expand on what Vortac said, a lot of BOINC veterans also tend to run a combination of profitable projects, and projects they believe in strongly that may not even pay out at all. I went so far as to split my BOINC contributions across two accounts: a Gridcoin focussed one and a philanthropic one.
I don't think Gridcoin will ever be profitable for the everyday cruncher on high competition projects, as more people will flood in. That being said, if we ever get an investor miner setting up something akin to a BTC ASIC warehouse, but for GRC, it would do wonders for research compute.
All us BOINC veterans share the same dilemma: philanthropy vs profits. Hopefully, we'll soon have Gridcoin valuable enough to cover all expenses, even when running most popular projects like World Community Grid. In the meantime, have one large upvote for your efforts and integrity.
Sorry to hear about your friend, I lost my Dad to cancer a few years ago.
I think the wonderful thing about science is, all knowledge is good knowledge. Who knew that understanding atomic physics, would have such a huge impact on understanding biological processes? Who would have imagined that computer science would have this massive impact on understanding cancers?
I fully understand your desire to make direct progress on cancer, and as a BOINCer for over a decade, I regularly mix projects based on what I feel is important to me at the time.
I guess Im just saying that even if you are doing mathmatics research, who knows what that might reveal, that indirectly benefits cancer research.
@lisagenaille is a pre med that is looking to build a gridcoin machine on her budget. I pointed her your way @dutch but anyone that is part of the gridcoin community here in sure she'd appreciate the help.