Gridcoin - A Crypto that Empowers Scientific Research
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....
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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....
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....
Dr. Greg Irving, a Clinical Lecturer from the University of Cambridge, recently authored a research project on the potential impact of blockchain technology on scientific research. While the use is not novel in principle, it underscores the very reason blockchain was created. Why Scientific Research? Irving, and rightfully so, says that in order to truly trust scientific research the reader’s must know that the content and subsequent conclusions of the research has maintained its integrity throughout editing and publishing. The author references “outcome switching, data dredging, and....
A recent science publication on F1000Research ventures into the world of using Bitcoin technology to improve the trustworthiness of medical science. The trust in scientific research has diminished over the past few years due to data and evidence manipulation. And it’s possible that Bitcoin could restore that trust. Bitcoin Technology Timestamping For....
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,....