GridCoin: Using the Blockchain for Good
A major criticism of Bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies in general, is that the mining network is extremely wasteful. By design it requires resources committed to doing arbitrary calculations. Should those calculations rather not be arbitrary and instead all the computational power be used doing something beneficial for humanity? GridCoin is an altcoin that attempts to do just that, using the blockchain to empower scientific research. GridCoin is linked with the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) system. BOINC allows for personal computers all over the world to link....
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The Digital currency evolution started with bitcoin in 2009, the year when it was first introduced. Bitcoin and other altcoins have since then become a very important part of the world's economy. The popularity of bitcoin has made digital currency synonymous with finance and fintech sector. However, the use of digital currency is not confined to fintech anymore. The blockchain technology powering bitcoin is an open source technology which can be used for a wide range of applications. Scientific research is one such area which has gained a lot of attention in the recent days. There are many....
According to Gridcoins website. What Gridcoin wants to do is taken even if it’s a little portion of that essentially wasted resources and put it towards distributed computing (BOINC) which would benefit a wide variety of fields of studies such as medicine, biology, climatology, mathematics, and astrophysics, just to name a few. It wants to benefit from the POW networks; it’s not changing the work. It’s simply repurposing what the work is doing. This allows the network’s BOINC contribution to scale properly with the POW network.
It's difficult to think of the huge computing power dedicated to Bitcoin and altcoin mining, much higher than the combined computing power of the 500 most powerful supercomputers on the planet, without thinking that perhaps all that computing power should be put to good use. The Bitcoin network can be thought of a distributed supercomputer dedicated to a single computational task - maintaining the Bitcoin system itself - which is a very useful task by itself. But there are many distributed computing projects, such as Folding@home and SETI@home, dedicated to important scientific tasks,....
I've long been interested in ways to use cryptocurrency mining to solve practical problems; proof-of-work's waste of energy is its biggest problem, the solution to which could be the final nail in fiat's coffin. While Gridcoin showed some promise, it failed to take off, and the search for a scientific coin capable of taking us to the moon continues. Many seemed to criticize its centralized nature--a central authority vets which scientific programs users can participate in, and validates their efforts--and maintaining proper security while dedicating more resources to useful work has proven....
Buried beneath the myriad of indistinguishable pump-and-dump altcoins, every now and then a cryptocurrency is born that truly revolutionizes the field. While this doesn't necessarily obsolete Bitcoin-the protocol can be upgraded at any time-it's important to examine these new coins in order to keep up the pace of innovation. Take Gridcoin, for example. Some background: one of the primary arguments against Bitcoin has been the wastefulness of its mining network, which consumes massive amounts of electricity. Instead of crunching arbitrary numbers, many in the community have hypothesized....