Nonsense money

The more I dwell on the crypto space, the more I see a lot of crypto stuff that bores me to death. Some crypto projects don't do anything new, and some don't even do anything. They're perpetually "the next big thing", they can even be on the top 10 cryptocurrencies and all, but they really aren't a usable product, something useful to today's society. You can trade them, speculate on their value, but in their essence they're just useless crap.

I only invest in things I can use today and where I see value for myself. That's why I'll be posting about blockchains I use, and their reasons to use.

Gridcoin

So today I'll talk about one coin that adds something different: Gridcoin (GRC). Actually Gridcoin is a simple proof-of-stake network, which means that if you have some GRC, you have the chance to stake it in order to validate blocks, and earn some interest as a reward. Many blockchains use proof-of-stake to validate transactions, and it's a good way to avoid using large amounts of energy to mine coins like Bitcoin.

What makes Gridcoin different? Is the way it's awarded! Gridcoin is awarded to those who prove they donated their computational power to the science via the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). This means that instead of earning coins by using lots of energy to solve a stupid math problem with the sole purpose of selecting who has the right to validate transactions (i.e. Bitcoin), you'll be getting coins by using that energy (=computational power) to a noble cause such as the cure for zika or cancer, helping the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in it's calculations, or solving complex math calculations just for the sake of maths.

_{You can earn GRC by using BOINC to donate to IBM's World Community Grid}

How do I do that?

Gridcoin "mining" works in multiple devices (even on your phone!) and you can configure it to only run when it's charging, or when it's idle, and adjust the amount of power you want to donate. The easiest way to configure the donation/mining process is mining in a pool (there's currently only one pool: grcpool.com). If you have a powerful computer mining 24h/day, you'll prefer to go solo! Since most people won't be mining 24h/day, I'll teach how to pool mine on your computer.

1. First of all you need to install BOINC here. Install it, open and leave it open while you create a grcpool account.

2. Now go to www.grcpool.com and click on "sign up". You'll be asked to fill a form. Do it and log in. Easy.

3. Go back to the BOINC window and under "view" select "advanced view". Then, under "options" select "use account manager". You'll be prompted this screen.

Under "account manager URL" write https://www.grcpool.com. You'll be asked to login, do it!

4 . Go back to the grcpool website and you'll notice your computer now shows under "hosts". Click on it and you'll find the details of your computer/android device.

5 . You can now select a project to donate to! I won't be recommending any in particular because that's a whole other post. My choices are very "emotive": I favor diseases research so most of my little computacional power is on World Community Grid. But I also help SETI and LHC. If you want to make a lot of coins, I advise you to make a little research on your own since some projects award more than others.

6 . And that's it! You should also explore a bit on your own, get involved on what's the mission of each project, tweak your settings to suit your needs, and setting up a wallet (I use coinomi wallet) to collect your GRC coins! They aren't worth much but hey... You're doing the right thing!

Do you want to earn SBD forever? I'm giving away 1 Steem Basic Income share :) Just drop an original comment in this post!

More than 60% of children in São Tomé are extremely poor. Please help me raise funds to give them! You can even win a SBI share just for resteeming this post

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