I have only been mining cryptocurrencies for 2 months, but from the get go I have thrown myself 100% behind mining only a single currency - GRC. This may be non-conventional, as most serious miners switch between coins to maximise their profits, but mining Gridcoin has benefits above and beyond the bottom line:

Gridcoin pays out in proportion to research work done through the BOINC platform. This replaces POW of the classic coins, and means that while 'mining' I am actually generating tangible research results. I have personally contributed to mapping the Milky Way, several cryptographic applications, solving Riesel and Sierpinsky bases, and folding protein structures - among other things.

The community looks out for each other. Everyone is endlessly helpful in working together and supporting the network. There is even a tradition that every new member of the network is given some token amount of GRC to get them started on their journey!

At the end of the day, even if all of crypto falls to pieces, my time and compute has been well spent. As a researcher myself, I am stoked to see compute being spent wisely instead of hashing into the empty void.

My Mining Set-up

My mining set-up is a little out of the ordinary both in terms of size and hardware, comprising a mix of CPUs and GPUs across almost the entire spectrum from the last 5 years. Without going into full detail, here are some of the key statistics (click the picture for my Gridcoin stats page):

This currently yields a mint just shy of 800 GRC per day. What is missing from this picture is that this is the amount of hardware I have running on average. Some of this is often diverted to research jobs outside the BOINC infrastructure, and it takes a significant amount of time on my part to manage this. Of course, I would much rather spend time optimising the use of hardware than having it sit idle on its way to becoming obsolete (as all hardware is within 5 years to a decade).

You're Doing Something Right When People Think You Are Cheating!

Ever since joining the crypto mining scene, I have been mining so much Gridcoin that some people suspected foul play was involved. I'll take that as a compliment - must be doing something right to get that kind of praise!

To be fair, the concern of the user was kind of understandable. We have in the past seen a user who distributed the BOINC research software as a virus and collected the earnings on the research done by the PCs he infected. Needless to say, the days of that user were numbered. Both the BOINC project admins and the Gridcoin devs rapidly put a stop to the operation after running the virus in a sandbox to see what it was doing.

The Bottom Line

Gridcoin exists to support people already contributing to BOINC, and to encourage more people to get involved. It is not the most expensive coin, and may not be the most efficient coin to mine - but that is OK. Everyone contributing to the 'mining' effort is helping to make tangible progress in the scientific community. As the Gridcoin community grows, this will result in simultaneous natural growth in the value of the coin - especially once research institutes use it to buy compute. This infrastructure already exists and is 100% functional!

With the community having grown significantly in the past month alone, and GRC being worth over 5 times as much as it was this time last year, it will be exciting to see where BOINC and Gridcoin go next!

If you would like to get involved, I published a full guide on how to get set up with Gridcoin from a cold start on Steemit a while ago. You could also get started with pool mining, as it is quicker and easier to get going. Finally, there is a wealth of information available on Gridcoin.us.

Content credit:

Banner, @joshoeah

Infographic, @me-shell

Footer, @me-shell