Gridcoin's Reddit night (19/20 March 2016.)
If you have ever studied Gridcoin in more detail, you have surely noticed this large spike in Gridcoin price and trade volume which has occurred almost exactly one year ago:
Poloniex price chart. During this spike, Gridcoin price reached an all time high value of 0.00009299 BTC. Market cap reached $10M.
Number of Google searches per day for term 'Gridcoin'. Big spike during the same period.
This event is usually referred to as "the Reddit night" among the Gridcoin community.
So what happened? One of our members posted this nice Gridcoin infographic, titled "A currency minted by doing science" (imgur link) to the Futurology subreddit (which has over 10 million subscribers):
And then, in less than an hour, that post simply went viral, in a frenzy of upvotes and comments. It was an explosion - within 3 hours, it had over one million views and was featured on the front page of Reddit, attracting huge attention and a whirlwind of clicks. It was a perfect storm, pushing all the right 'futurology buttons': science, technology, cutting edge innovation, green eco-friendliness and, of course, money (who's immune to that). After all, no person who is even remotely interested in futurology (me included) can't help, but think: what if this Gridcoin had the market cap of Bitcoin? What could science accomplish then, in the near future? There is certainly a strong "The Singularity is Near" aspect to it, again something that any futurologist simply can't miss (or ignore).
Here is the whole thread (archived), it's an interesting read:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/4b4drk/a_currency_minted_by_doing_science
"A currency minted by doing science" thread today. 5117 upvotes, 857 comments - certainly one of the most important Gridcoin threads ever
But it was not to last. Next day (March 20), Reddit moderators simply removed the post from the front page (due to "numerous complaints", as they explained afterwards) and the whole thing quickly abated. But not before the news hit Poloniex and other crypto-exchanges, pushing the Gridcoin price to record highs.
Since then, Gridcoin has been under much closer attention of Reddit censors all across the board. Posts mentioning Gridcoin are now being promptly deleted (usually within few minutes) on almost every subreddit, except on crypto-related ones. We've even had content deleted from BOINC subreddit (yes, Gridcoin is rewarding BOINC computations, but apparently that's not good enough for moderator freaks there). So, nothing new in that sorry world of unrestricted censorship and centralized moderator powers. Futurology needn't bother with them any longer, that's for sure.
I remember waking up that morning looking at my crypto holdings on my phone, and being a little shocked. I almost pinched myself to see if I was dreaming.
Of course the real dream is the scientific research we are helping, and the benefits to humanity that will bring.
I was awake all night, watching the whole show. Being still fresh to crypto then, it was actually the first spike I observed in real-time, so it was quite an experience.
It was an excellent boost for Gridcoin, but it's highly unlikely to happen again - the reddit mods in front page featured subs will simply ban it.
Encountering censorship on /r/BOINC is crazy, the mod in question is a moderator of 30+ subs which quite clearly shows that he's power mad, to the detriment of the sub's content.
We even got censored in a WCG AMA on /r/science.
Reddit sucks, steemit FTW!
We got some good promotion in MilkyWay@home AMA, but that was back in November 2015. when we were still pretty much "under the radar". They won't let us off the hook now, that's for sure.
What were the "numerous complaints"? Or, did the mods not disclose? Are we being censored due to a general anti-crypto sentiment, or is it something specific to Gridcoin?
I guess the reasons can be many, depend also on the guy who "censors", best to ask them:
This may also be relevant.
They disclosed very little. It boils down to "we can delete what we want, at any moment":
Multiple people complained about the whole thread being spam & its been deleted by another Mod here
You can find more details on cryptocointalk:
https://cryptocointalk.com/topic/1331-new-coin-launch-announcement-grc-gridcoin/page-1122
We were tipping users that were interested in Gridcoin or BOINC in the thread, and that was the mod's main problem. That combined with the fact that they didn't believe that Gridcoin fitted the /r/futurology topic, so they removed/hid it from the public.