Gridcoin Mining for Science

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Gridcoin A cryptocurrency that’s actually productive!  I came across Gridcoin (Ticker: GRC) the other day.

Gridcoin helps with cancer and malaria research as well as studying astronomy and solving math problems.

BOINC Logo It caught my eye because Bitcoins and most cryptocurrencies require miners to spend a lot of computing power mining hashes that aren’t really useful.  Some argue that this is wasting gigawatts of energy each day.  Gridcoin mining actually pays miners to do useful computing by teaming up with BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing).  BOINC is a way for people to donate the idle time on their computer for various research or grid computing projects.  Gridcoin uses a DPOR (Distributed Proof of Research) mechanism to reward miners by paying out Gridcoin based on the work they do on approved BOINC projects.

Asteriod

Miners can choose to work on a variety of projects.  Solving math problems ranging from computing primes to cracking Enigma messages; researching cures for diseases like cancer and malaria and simulating protein folding; astronomy projects researching asteroids, searching for pulsar stars, mapping the milky way; and various other projects like monitoring wildlife.

Unlike Bitcoin which require specialized ASICS to mine efficiently, because there are a variety of BOINC projects they will most likely be better for general purpose computing hardware.  Some projects are better suited for CPU, some for AMD GPUs, some for NVIDIA, Android devices, etc.  You pick the projects based on the type of hardware you already have.

GRCWithTextOnBottom I don’t see Gridcoin as being very profitable (monetarily) for miners-however, this is a fantastic idea and I hope we see more projects that reward miners for doing actual useful computing!

If you want to get started mining Gridcoin start out by following the directions on the Gridcoin.co Pool.

I’ve been mining for three weeks with a VM (given 8 vCPUs) with the Xeon D-1540 and so far have around 430 coins.  With the current exchange that’s $2.67.  Enough to buy two cheeseburgers.

GRC: SDBycsHrreXXhFAm1nZiYa7SGobBzkVbSH

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1 thought on “Gridcoin Mining for Science”

  1. yes i agree, in August 2025, GRC (Gridcoin) is still a fantastic idea and still works and is maintained. From a monetary point of view, most stock-exchanges have meanwhile de-listed GRC from their portfolios which i consider a shame. Yet it is all about the science and that this currency is aparantly the only one out there that actually rewards something. I am using it. Have the Gridcoin Research Wallet installed and running on my everyday_PC and have BOINC running a few cpu-only projects (currently Milkiway@Home because it works best, and Einstein@Home only on my integrated intel iGPU) and also have Folding@Home running on my NVIDIA GPU. There are instructions on the web how to make Folding@Home earn Gridcoin, F@H is not directly a BOINC project (as it requires its own folding-at-home client) but there is a type of “adapter” that allows you to connect F@H to the CPID of your gridcoin wallet. Maybe in future the overall vlaue (recognition and monetarily) will rise again. i still consider it a solid system and it requires much less hardware to be operative (e.g. compared to Bitcoin).
    so i can only encourage people with interest in biology/medicine and astronomy (and mathematics) to coltinue crunching!

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