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 their spare computational power to a cloud-computing network. Scientists can use this network in order to solve problems that require massive computational power.

For example, BOINC provides computational power to the weather simulators needed by meteorologists, it crunches numbers for particle accelerators, and helps in the search for undiscovered neuron stars and extra-terrestrial life. It is even used in medical research, focusing on the cures for cancer, schizophrenia and the treatment of Alzheimer’s.

Unfortunately, the calculations that are needed for most of this research cannot be used instead of the proof of work problems required to run a blockchain. Those calculations have a very specific set of criteria that few scientific problems adhere to. Instead, GridCoin incentivises miners to run both BOINC and GridCoin mining side-by-side. The incentive is that, while miners who do not run the BOINC system receive only 5 GridCoin (GRC) for mining a block, those that do will receive extra GRC based on how much relative computational power they donate to the BOINC network (up to 150 GRC). This ensures that the integrity of the blockchain remains intact, while the system strongly rewards miners for computational power committed to scientific benefits.

Under the hood, the crypocurrency side of GridCoin runs in a similar way to LiteCoin. The coin’s production rate halves every four years, a new block is mined every 2.5 minutes, and it utilizes a script-based proof-of-work system. It will produce approximately 336 million coins. There are no pre-mined coins.