Most of the crypto world is keeping a close eye on the skyrocketing price of Bitcoin as it continues its trip to the moon. In fact, it is difficult to browse Steemit at the moment without seeing something of the form:
"BTC ... USD$4000 ... Bullish!!!"
However, I believe this is a perfect time to move my attention to the altcoins. Most altcoins have seen rapid drops in price, as a direct result of investors moving their investment from the altcoins into the core coins BTC and ETH. This has left the altcoins significantly undervalued.
I especially like the positioning of Gridcoin right now. Gridcoin rewards scientific compute carried out on the BOINC platform as its primary 'mining' mechanic, whilst also awarding 1.5% annual POS to its holders. As a PhD student myself, I am very excited by the potential in pointing crypto mining compute towards real world scientific applications - especially so as I can purchase cheap compute through the Gridcoin network with GRC. However, there are many other reasons I see Gridcoin as a great investment:
GRC is currently incredibly cheap, sitting at about 25% of its all time high and running up only 800 satoshi per coin. I would wager that GRC will double in price long before we live to see USD$8000 Bitcoin.
The growth potential of the coin is massive. It is the only coin to allow anyone to buy distributed compute power right now. Meanwhile, competitors like the GNT token are still fluffing around with a CPU only beta test. GRC is the only competitor in the distributed compute field built on a proven framework, BOINC, which has enjoyed almost two decades of development.
GRC runs on its own blockchain, meaning there is no need to worry about the impending US legislation regarding Ethereum tokens.
There is a significant update coming to the Gridcoin client to permanently address previous scaling issues by the unexpected explosive growth witnessed by the network in the past few months.
Even thought the compute involved in the 'mining' of GRC has doubled in the last 2 months, it is still significantly easier to mine than most other coins. As a result, I currently have a cluster outputting nearly 200 TFLOPS running BOINC to mine GRC.
If you would like to get started mining Gridcoin yourself by contributing to research, you can do so by installing BOINC and the Gridcoin Wallet. I have authored a guide in the past that walks you through the entire process from a cold start, The Total and Utter Noobie Guide to Successfully Solo Mining the Cryptocurrency Gridcoin.
If you would like to simply invest in Gridcoin, you will find it on most major exchanges including Polonies, Bittrex and the DEX.
Content credit:
Header, @joshoeah
Footer, @me-shell
It is true, after the fork was the time to buy btc. Right now we are overbought and we may continue to remain overbought for a while with the market risen and extended but it is not the time to buy because of FOMO
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Hey Dutch,
as a Gridcoiner, I have a question, because obviously I missed something: Can you really already buy computing power in GRC? You wrote: "- especially so as I can purchase cheap compute through the Gridcoin network with GRC", but I have not read about that yet, only that it is planned. But maybe I missed something.... ;) Would be nice if you could update me!
Greetings,
dysprosium
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Hey! So, yes and no. Essentially what I have done here in the lab is set up my own BOINC server, which takes about an afternoon. I am currently working on getting work units ready.
Once I have that done, I will effectively have an active BOINC project that anyone can contribute to. To encourage such contributions, I can 'rain' Gridcoin onto the project. Each user will then receive Gridcoin proportional to their contribution, or any other metric I may want to use. For a whitelisted project, this is taken care of by the wallet, and for non-whitelisted projects there is a python script by @scalextrix.
So, while I can't buy X TFLOPS of compute for Y GRC, I can effectively promote compute on my project.
The planned feature you may be thinking of is project rain, which aims to do the same thing but with a wider range of cryptocurrencies instead of just GRC.
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This will end up drastically limiting accessibility to BOINC crunchers. Projects which wish to compete will have to rain GRC on their crunchers instead of just letting GRC reward crunchers for their volunteer work regardless of project operation. This means that only those with the most GRC will be able to run successful projects.
It goes against many of the basic principals of the BOINC community and I am fairly confident there will be some backlash from that community.
This looks very much like BTC Utopia which destroyed GRC reputation.
I could be wrong.
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More established projects like SETI@home, WCG, Einstein@home etc. will always have plenty of dedicated crunchers, willing to compute completely for free. That creates an environment in which it is difficult for a new project to get enough volunteers, because you have to compete against established projects and you have to deal with general lack of volunteer computing power. Plenty of new BOINC projects would surely welcome an opportunity to attract some attention with a little GRC rain.
Of course, there will be plenty of crunchers who will insist on running BOINC completely for free and they will have their way too - just install BOINC, run it and there's no crypto in your way.
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@vortac I'd love to hear your throughts on @nightshift1134's idea for helping small projects and new users at the same time. It is posted here. I detail some other benefits this GRCStarter@home project might bring in my response in the comments.
It provides the same benefit as rain, but in a way that adheres to the principals set out by BOINC.
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What would the GRCStarter@home project actually compute? Because it looks like "lets crunch whatever, it's the agenda that matters" and that's not entirely along the BOINC principles either.
Our current objective is clear: compute something useful->get proportional BOINC credits->get proportional GRC rewards and it applies for every BOINC project (in stark contrast to repetitive PoW hashing). "Compute whatever->get arbitrary RAC->get arbitrary mag" dilutes that objective.
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I have created a proposal based off of this conversation. Find it here:
GRCStarter@home Proposal
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I agree:
I also agree that:
The WU hosted on GRCStarter@home could be anything. It depends on how its operation is structured:
Perhaps one set of WU is crunched at a time. At any time, someone can propose a different set of WU for GRCStarter and the community votes on whether or not to switch to that work.
Perhaps there is a ledger of WU ready to be processed on GRCStarter. The work is added to this ledger by some process -- voting in, proposal, whatever. There is a poll that runs for a block of time... days, weeks, months, years, whatever. People can change their vote to support different WU sets while the poll is running. The amount of time allotted to specific WU sets is proportional, or some relation, to that sets support in the poll. When the poll ends, there is some process that determines the next ledger of WUs -- maybe it's the sets with the highest support from the previous poll + sets with the highest support in a second poll regarding proposed sets. A poll is then created for the new ledger.
Perhaps GRCStarter is only for researchers which put together proposals for getting their work crunched on GRCStarter and the community votes on the best proposal.
Perhaps there is a limit to the number of work units GRCStarter can run for a project and a time limit each project can run its WU on GRCStarter -- once x number of cobblestone is produced or x number of hours is met, or whatever, the project can no longer host WU on GRCStarter. This means that if a project wants all the attention from new users and philanthropic magsters it must put the effort in to convince the GRC community it is a worthwhile project.
Perhaps, one day, GRCStarter gets integrated into the Gridcoin blockchain and stakers choose which WU get processed through blockchain consensus.
These processes removes the risk of someone buying out, or monopolizing, BOINCs main resource: its processing. This risk is present in a rain system, but can be managed through regulation.
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Hey jringo,
I see your point, but as soon as a project gets whitelisted, the Gridcoin distribution happens automatically. As I understand it, this might be a way to finance little projects with just some 1000 WUs or so, adding the GRC rain to attract crunchers quickly! But well, same here, I could be wrong as well! ;)
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I think the intent is perfect. Have you read @nightshift1134's idea found here?
I detail how his idea might look and what it achieves in my comment to that post.
I'm interested to hear what you think of that approach of helping little projects instead of an open rain mechanism which makes GRC more like its competitors which have very different goals than Gridcoin.
Little projects get the attention of new users and philanthropic whales!
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Out of curiosity, what is your BOINC project focused on?
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Additionally, and to support my claim that BOINC does not like this sort of thing, @cm-steem is working on a similar project called Project Rain which was recently rejected from the BOINC GitHub.
I think the idea holds potential, but its execution has to be well thought out.
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From David Anderson:
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=11647&postid=79222#79222
I'd love to see BOINC credit used as proof of work for a cryptocurrency. In fact I proposed this to Bitcoin a long time ago; they declined because BOINC isn't fully distributed, fair enough. But this can't be built directly into BOINC, NSF wouldn't be OK with that.
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"BOINC credit used as proof of work for a cryptocurrency" is Gridcoin. Anderson is not saying that he wants to make it rain all over BOINC projects.
Making it rain has more to do with distributing gridcoin. Making it rain also effects the BOINC economy -- the resources of BOINC, all that processing power, will go to those who offer the most Gridcoin. This can help small projects, sure, but it will also help people with a lot of money or a lot of Gridcoin. Eventually, and no matter what people will always do (crunch seti), this will lead to consolidation and corruption.
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David Anderson said he likes the idea of BOINC computations being rewarded with cryptocurrency and that's an essential point here. Those rewards are monetized and are worth something on the crypto-exchanges and David is obviously fine with that (since he is mentioning that Bitcoin reference).
After that, money follows its own path and one can do with it as he/she likes. I can rain it all over, hoard it, lose it, whatever. You can't have it both ways - being rewarded and completely avoiding the negative aspects of being rewarded. Obviously, benefits outweigh the drawbacks here and I would say that David Anderson (and the BOINC community) understands that.
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I dont get that, if you have to keep paying people to crunch your project, you will eventually run out of funds, but all the whitelisted projects will be rewarded indefinately.
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Thanks @dutch, last time I checked in the wallet problem wasnt fixed yet https://github.com/gridcoin/Gridcoin-Research/issues/441
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Would the University distribute GRC from their own wallet to the users? Where's the funding coming from?
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I am funded directly to do my PhD work, so I would be using parts of research grants to buy GRC and spend it on compute.
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Thank you for your hard work on your article
I am getting very excited about it
I will definitely buy some for myself but most importantly I'm looking forward into mining it
I think is the right time to get involved
Keep it up
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It's an interesting coin, very great real world implications, I could see it growing
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Always, informative as usual. I am so glad I came across Gridcoin and the community, it was a life changer for me.
Salute @dutch
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I will take a look to this coin, It seems interesting. I agree with you, right now there are altcoins that can multiply your investment by 10, 20, 100... But I'm not agree when you say that the price of some coins dropped. They just changed its satoshi value, I mean, the price is almost the same but we see that coins are dropping. It's a little bit confusing but I think it's important to understand this if we are going to invest.
Nice post and nice information!
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I'm pretty new to Cryptos, and this was one of the first things I had to get my head around. The fact that each currency has its USD price and Satoshi price therefore can remain the same value but drop against BTC.
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Thank you for the information. Will look into it.
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Just to stress, GRC is at .03c and has been around there for some time now. When BTC is bullish, it is difficult to use satoshi as a marker of price. BTC is not much cheaper right now than it was when BTC was 3000 or 3500.
And what do you mean by purchase cheap compute?! You don't purchase compute when you purchase GRC! All the computer is volunteer! = )
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Most people invested in crypto will likely have some BTC as it is a coin that is often traded through to get to another coin. So yes, while GRC has not moved much relative to the USD, it has dropped significantly relative to BTC due to the latter's colossal climb over the last few weeks.
As someone who has spent significant time active in the community I thought you were aware of this? Anyone is able to rain GRC on a project to encourage crunchers on the Gridcoin network to run their jobs. Whitelisted projects are supported directly through the wallet client, while @Scalextrix has released a python script that allows the same for projects not yet on the whitelist.
As such, I may very well be purchasing compute when I purchase GRC!
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If you do that @dutch let me know and I'll switch over some crunching power to you, it's not much atm [10 core, 4 gpu at 5+ gflops] but i like what you do 😁
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Thank you! It's a work in progress, but I will keep the community updated.
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I am very aware. I discuss an alternative to that idea with @nightshift1134 in his post, A New Project Called Rain and explain some terms that will be used for further discussion in my post The Value of Gridcoin - A Continuation and Response - An Alternative Rain Proposal
Gridcoin as its ticker represents a length of time spent volunteering processing power on the platform BOINC. If we begin to see GRC as something you buy to fund projects that need to be computed we have turned into GOLEM, iEx, or SONM, and at that point we put ourselves at a huge disadvantage.
I think we could incorporate a rain aspect more into GRC, but BOINC will not like it as it will completely destroy the gamified volunteer computing economy they have built over the past few decades. If we do this, we would need intense regulation. What is to stop another BTC Utopia type effect from happening?
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shared on ann & reddit :*
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