Introduction

About a year ago I was looking into options to make a little extra money from my numerous computers sitting in my office. Bitcoin was no longer an option, due to the prevalence of mining through the use of specialized ASICs, meaning the dollar return from using a home PC wouldn’t even come close to covering the electricity costs.

It was during my search that I first stumbled across Gridcoin, an alternative cryptocurrency to the likes of Bitcoin. Gridcoin perfectly fit what I was looking for, I could donate my many computers idle time to contribute to scientific research projects run by universities and research organizations, by running software called BOINC, and get rewarded in an amount of Gridcoin relative to the amount of work my computers had completed.

There was a bit of a learning curve getting the software setup, and choosing the right projects to contribute to for my hardware, but the whole package appealed to my interest in building pc’s, optimizing for best results and not simply burning power on useless hashing to generate bitcoin (I know people say hashing is necessary to secure the Bitcoin blockchain, but to me that just means the Bitcoin’s core is extremely inefficient).  Since starting with Gridcoin I have become even more convinced that this cryptocurrency can seriously encourage contribution to volunteer computing projects, as well as be viable stable currency that can hold it’s own against other top cryptocurrencies.

Important points for me:

• Gridcoin rewards are in return for contributing valuable compute resources to scientific research.
• Decentralization – Rewards are issued to researchers/miners by the distributed Gridcoin network, not an individual or group in control.
• Issue of rewards is secure, such that users cannot cheat the system to get more Gridcoin
• By contributing to Gridcoin and BOINC, and encouraging more people to contribute, this will draw more people into contributing their computers idle processing time to valuable scientific research and in turn the price should increase due to the fact that many people will never sell Gridcoin for less than the electricity cost to earn them.
• An active development team who have made fantastic progress in improving the Gridcoin software, along with an involved community of enthusiastic researchers/miners.

Growth Potential

The current market capitalization of Gridcoin is just below USD $60,000,000.  There are currently 61 cryptocurrencies with a market cap above USD $500,000,000!  Given the current state of Gridcoin user growth, the huge benefits to society of BOINC contribution, large existing BOINC user base, and the fact that almost any PC can take part earning Gridcoin, I strongly believe that in the short term Gridcoin will also be in this category, and it has potential to go much further in the mid to long term.

Gridcoin price for the last 90 days, approximately 500% increase!

At the time of writing (3 Jan 2018) there are almost 10,000 members signed up to pool mine through GRC Pool, and another 1800 actively solo mining (which is a bit more effort to get started).  Just six months ago GRC Pool had only  2600 members (approximately).  So there are already a lot of people involved contributing to Gridcoin, and the number is now growing quickly as more people become aware of it’s existence.  It would be easy to say that the price increase above is just a temporary spike driven by speculative trading, however this increase in users is real organic growth which suggests otherwise.

GRC Pools user numbers for the last 342 days

Gridcoin issues a target amount of 48,000 GRC per day, regardless of how many users are involved.  So as more people get involved, the amount of Gridcoin each user receives on average will decline.  Since the electricity consumption, and therefore cost of contribution is steady, this should (and history shows does) cause an increase in the value of the coin.  My advice is don’t sell the Gridcoin you earn!  It will be worth much more in the future!

Getting Started

If you want to get started contributing and earning Gridcoin, I recommend going to Gridcoin.Science, and follow the instructions to get set up in GRC Pool (link under ‘Get GRC -> Pool Mining).

I plan on writing some more articles in the coming weeks that will help demystify how to select projects to contribute to, give an idea of how much you will be rewarded, show some techniques to monitor multiple computers remotely, and give an overview of my setup.

Just remember, even by contributing your possibly humble pc resources you are helping contribute to some fantastic scientific projects and discoveries, and accumulate some Gridcoin at the same time before the price sky rockets.  Thank you for reading!

Reference Information

https://Gridcoin.Science – A new Gridcoin Landing page with a lot of information on Gridcoin, and how to get started.

http://Gridcoin.us – The original Gridcoin landing page. (Gridcoin is not centralized, so there is no ‘official’ site 🙂

https://steemit.com/trending/gridcoin – Many community members post useful information on the Steem platform, and is worth checking regularly.

https://poloniex.com/exchange#btc_grc – An online exchange where you can check the value of Gridcoin against Bitcoin.

https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/gridcoin-research/usd – A site with heaps of cryptocurrency info, take a look at the Gridcoin to USD price!