Introducing Gridcoin Research: A Proof-of-Science Coin!
Technically called "proof-of-research", this coin makes serious use of your excess hashpower.
GridCoin (GRC) is a coin that attempts to get around the uselessness and arbitrary crunching of most hashing algorithms by dedicating your CPU cycles to SCIENCE!
Feeling down because you don't have a good enough graphics card to mine ZCash or no ASICs with which to mine Bitcoin directly? As long as you have a working CPU, then you can contribute to the cause of Gridcoin Research.
Definitely one of the most innovative coins out there, Gridcoin supports the BOINC supercomputer infrastructure to run approved hard-science computing problems on behalf of the projects co-ordinated by Berkeley University. You can run the classic search-for-ET radio signal scan, SETI@Home which was doing distributed computing networks before Bitcoin was even a white paper. Among other projects like IBM's World Computing Grid and the never-ending search for huge prime numbers, Gridcoin has something for everyone.
Indeed, Gridcoin is an excellent solution to what is a common complaint about various cryptocurrency networks: The wastefulness of thousands of computers, loaded with expensive GPUs, doing nothing but pointless high-tech sudoku puzzles - albeit at blazing fast speeds. What do you get at out of all this? A lot of heat, and verified transactions.
- Gridcoin manages to get SCIENCE as a result of every coin, and still is a great currency for transactions with low fees and fast confirmation times
As a passionate scientist myself, I can't help but see the promise in something like Gridcoin, the perfect combination of cryptocurrency and charitable computing-for-a-cause systems. Now any participant, large or small, can be rewarded in a token of real value for their contribution to ongoing research in various fields. At the very least, Gridcoin has expanded people's minds and opened up the discussion on what we actually want to do with the precious CPU and GPU cycles dedicated to mining. Of which more are coming on-line every single day.
What are your thoughts? Does Gridcoin have a place in the eco-system of coins?
Love the write-up! Gridcoin surely is an amazing blockchain and community. It's been undergoing crazy amounts of development over the past year as well.
Just need to clarify one thing:
For a variety of reasons -- mainly security --, we don't use proof-of-research anymore. We secure the blockchain with pure PoS and distributed GRC in relation to a participants contributions to the data-hosting platform BOINC (possibly more in the future).
Learn more here.
We're working on updating our whitepaper and other documentation to match.
Stay tuned!
Just to clarify, how exactly is the GRC distributed in relation to the contributions? Sounds a lot like proof of work to me, but is it different in what kind of work is being done?
Proof-of-X are protocols that create blocks, add them to the blockchain, and provide blockchain security. Gridcoin uses proof-of-stake for this process, which requires very little processing power.
This frees up processing power to be directed toward a meaningful task, as opposed to reciprocal hashing which is the task of proof-of-work blockchains.
Gridcoin reward stakers for securing the blockchain, just like other proof-of-stake blockchains, and defines a GRC kitty minted by the Gridcoin protocol, which is distribute to crunchers.
Gridcoin uses 2 forms of reward. Proof of Stake for securing the network and Proof of Research(Work) to reward users for crunching boinc projects.
nice post. Thanks :)
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