Why Gridcoin SHOULD Be Bigger Than It Is
Altcoins. There's literally thousands of them, all with their own unique selling point promising this, that and the other. Amongst the coins fighting for your investment etc there is Gridcoin.
In a time where we are literally in a world pandemic, a coin like Gridcoin should be shining and bringing the world together through it's computational power to reward those helping the greater good of mankind by participating in BOINC research.
For those of you who are unaware, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (lovingly referred to as BOINC) has been around for almost 20 years now and hosts a whole raft of projects for users to help lend their spare computational power to. Things like Rosetta@Home which covers various different biological projects, World Community Grid which covers medical, environmental and other humanitarian research, Einstein@Home which covers astrophysics and many more projects just waiting to have your help.
Using BOINC you get "rewards" of a sort, but they are just a number against your name showing how much you have participated, no monetary value etc, but pride in helping further science. What if there was a way to get physically rewarded though?
That's where Gridcoin steps in.
Linking up certified BOINC projects with Gridcoin actually rewards you for donating your computational power for those research projects, paying you in Gridcoin (GRC). You aren't just limited to Proof-of-Research though with Gridcoin. You can also stake your coins to receive rewards too. This means even if you don't have a computer spare to donate your spare power to, you can hold Gridcoin and help secure the network through staking.
I only really found out about Gridcoin by chance, as I was looking to get back into BOINC after some time away; I used to crunch projects for SETI@Home back in the day. The reason for me getting back into BOINC after all this time was of course Covid-19. There were some projects starting to role out research tasks to help with the search for a cure and I wanted to help get in on that and discovered that there was also now a way for me to get rewarded for my time and effort. What's not to love about that?!
This is why I think it should be huge right now, but alas, it is not...yet.
So if you do have the ability to donate some of your spare time and computing power to getting BOINC setup and helping humanity out, then please consider doing so and get rewarded at the same time.
Tl;dr - Use your spare computing power to help humanity and earn Gridcoin in the process!
I hope that GRC will one day rise to some level of significance but tbh if not in a pandemic, when would it have a chance?
I am happy crunching with gridcoin and maybe in 5-10 years I'll be able to buy a meal from my rewards.
Until then I hope that some people who are good at marketing will pay attention to Gridcoin and maybe can get it some more attention.
Honestly I thought that when this whole challenge of who helps out the most crunching against Covid thing came out that Gridcoin would experience a boom...But no, not really. I think we just need more people who are willing to put in the initial "risk" over a few years to crunch, then we need trading volume so the coin gets some attention and last but not least, to get the trading volume we need a reason to trade the coin. Right now, in my eyes there's no real reason to trade the coin other than holding it...