We live in the world which has unlocked many scientific secrets and achieved amazing engineering feats. But with many years of rapid scientific progress now behind us, one very important fact has emerged: the more we learn about the universe, the more it appears to be based on mathematical laws. There is a new era of science emerging right in front of us - the era of computational science, where apparently everything can be calculated.









That's good news - it means we could certainly learn much more about the universe and the world around us in the near future. That's also bad news - we don't have enough computing power to do so. More and more scientific projects across the world are stalled - due to lack of computing power. Faced with the same problem 18 years ago, some smart guys over at the University of Berkeley said: Well, let's split our large computing tasks into small pieces and distribute them over the Internet. Perhaps people will compute them for free? People did and thus [email protected] was born (and became globally popular). Few years later, it was expanded and it became the BOINC network which included many different scientific projects from all across the world. And thus volunteer distributed computing was born.





Distributed computing: there's plenty of computing power in the world, the problem is how to harness it.





But the problem remained. Our demand for computing power is increasing very fast, while BOINC output is increasing very slow. Yes, it's true - even with Bitcoin hitting new all-time-highs and new Proof-of-Work coins appearing almost every week, established scientific projects (World Community Grid, [email protected], GPUGRID) which are attempting to find cures for some major human diseases (cancer, AIDS, Malaria, Alzheimer's, Ebola, Tuberculosis, Zika) are progressing only slowly - because they cannot afford enough computing power and volunteer computing is having a hard time meeting the demand. It isn't difficult to see why - when computing for free, you still have to pay for the hardware and you still have to pay for electricity.





Bitcoin price in the last 60 days: from $1200 to $2800, nice exponential growth









BOINC output in the last 60 days: from 4.205 trillion credits to 4.424, steady linear growth





You, the crypto-enthusiast, can turn the things around. Perhaps you are already mining some Proof-of-Work crypto on your machine? Profits are good, you are invested, don't wanna switch? Spare only a core or two for BOINC and volunteer science. Want to contribute more? Devote both your CPU and GPU to BOINC and join Gridcoin, a currency minted by BOINC computations and computational science. Gridcoin currently has the marketcap of $22 million, with one Gridcoin worth approximately 5 cents. Even at that price, it's already possible to turn a slight profit, running only BOINC, computing only for science and mining only Gridcoin. Only a few years ago, such an idea would have been dismissed as utopian science fiction.

Now, imagine one Gridcoin worth 50 cents. Thousands of new crunchers would join up and BOINC would experience the exponential growth it needs to catch up with the computing demands of modern science. Imagine one Gridcoin worth 100x more or $5. Welcome to the era of computational science. It's hard to even imagine today the level of scientific progress achievable with such a large computing network, it would start to look a lot like Ray Kurzweil's Singularity. And that's not an outlandish idea - even at that price ($5), Gridcoin's marketcap would be $2.2 billion, placed only fifth on the list of most valuable cryptos today.





The University of Geneva's Professor Francois Grey, Computing for Clean Water, World Community Grid

What would you do if you had a lot more computing power? Like 100x more? Or even 1000x more? The analogy I would give, it's a bit like Galileo, if you asked him 'what will you see through the telescope', before he looked.