Gridcoin is the sixtieth fastest supercomputer in the world!

The ethos of BOINC and its projects has always been the contribution to science by normal everyday people with normal everyday equipment.
To me BOINC is an open-source volunteer oriented computing grid that combines the processing power of all individual users for the purposes of scientific research. It's free, and harnesses the unused clock cycles from processors and graphics cards to attempt to cure cancer/aids/ebola/malaria, map the milkyway, crack enigma codes, etc..

Yes there are a few of us who really take this seriously and 'crunch' science projects for the joy of earning the credits and badges of honor.
We crunch away even though we are spending our hard earned money to pay for the electricity that keeps those computation cycles going and take joy from the fact that 'we are doing our bit'.
I never had the reason, or the inclination, to join any of the array of teams that are available in the BOINC community in fact I've always been a bit of a loner.
However in recent years I became aware of one of the teams who, whilst 'crunching' on a long list of BOINC projects, were running a sideline project which has after a few years has turned into the Gridcoin Community.

The Gridcoin Community are BOINC users who love their projects just as much as the all the other BOINC users. However here's the difference:

Gridcoin was created as a method to help compensate citizen scientists donating their spare resources, to help the common good, by solving complex problems through distributed computing. This compensation may then be used by BOINCers to defray electricity expenses, be donated to their favorite project to assist in its funding, or simply used to buy equipment.

Gridcoin rewards BOINC computation using the Distributed Proof of Research (DPOR) reward mechanism, which is a combination of Proof of BOINC (POB) and Proof of Stake (POSv2).
Proof of Work (POW) consensus mechanisms are not utilised by the Gridcoin network, making the Gridcoin cryptocurrency network far more energy efficient than any existing POW cryptocurrencies.
Gridcoin (Ticker: GRC) is a decentralized, open source math-based digital asset (cryptocurrency). It performs transactions peer-to-peer cryptographically without the need for a central issuing authority. Gridcoin was the first block chain protocol that delivered a working algorithm that equally rewards and cryptographically proves solving BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) hosted work, which can be virtually any kind of distributed computing process (ASIC/GPU/CPU/Sensor/Etc).

So how have I benefited from my being a citizen scientist and donating my spare resources to BOINC projects?

I'm from the older generation and since I really began to get more involved in the Gridcoin BOINC Community I have discovered how many brilliant minds there are out there within this community and after investing some time in the community I have found that although, I may be elderly in my eyes, I too have a niche here. My interest in science has not abated but has been heightened and my new found interest in blockchain technology has taken me places I would never have gone before.