hey there = )

It's my pleasure. Thank you for your thoughts! GRC at its roots is something that is going to happen one way or another, some day by someone or some company or by us.

One aspect I liked about the rain proposal is that this creates a very real use and incentive to get GRCs: "Buying" computing power.

I cannot say this enough: If this is the incentive for buying Gridcoin, why would anyone buy Gridcoin? Personally, I would move my investment and time to a more established and developed system with hundreds of millions of dollars backing it -- one of our competitors... if they ever end up making a functional product.

The only difference between GRC and "Project Rain" grid computing platforms like Golem, iEx, and SONM, is that GRC lets a free market prioritizes the research produced. As soon as you restrict projects by tying their potential processing power to the asset created by a blockchain you destroy the free market and force it into a "pay-to-play" market: Those with the most money will dictate which projects are worthy of crunching and projects will cater their work and design to those with the most money so they can get their work processed. This centralizes control to the extreme.

The current BOINC economy leaves the decision of which projects are worth crunching up to the volunteer crunchers. They move to the project which they deem worthy, regardless of how much cobblestone they make off of it. This is a major aspect of BOINC which GRCStarter@home seeks to amplify -- a free market based on scientific results instead of money. @bullshark you should love that part! = )

There already is a very real reason to buy and hold GRC. It is both a commodity and an asset and also sort of a security. I would recommend researching these economic items and how they have been used and exploited through history to see the incredible value they posses. We do not need to remove the volunteer priority of GRC to give it value it already has! (Project Rain removes the volunteer priority unless heavily regulated, which I have seen no intent of from any of the proposals).

As it stands, if a researcher has work to be processed, they make a BOINC project and push to get it crunched. If they convince people that their project is worthy of the limited processing resources of the BOINC network, people will crunch their project! That's it! No need to buy anything or add layers of bureaucracy!

With GRCStarter@home, if that researcher does not have enough work to create an entire project, they can apply for GRCStarter@home, or any of the dozens of other projects which might spawn from a GRCStarter blockchain.

If that researcher does not convince enough people to work on their project, they can apply for GRCStarter@home or any of the dozens of other projects which might spawn from GRCStarter.

Other projects could be projects that: Crunch only environmental research, crunch only financial data, crunch only social data, crunch anything but send WU only to mobile devices, crunch anything but send WU only to arm devices. Crunch only environmental data on arm devices... there are endless possibilities.

Together for Gridcoin! = )

And regarding implementation, there are dozens of protocols that will work with a GRCStarter blockchain ;)