RE: My Thoughts on the Value of Gridcoin
A very well-written and thoughtful post. (How dare you?! j/k)
I have had all of those same thoughts, and no great answers. On the other hand, the entire crypto space has the same problem. Except for a few rare exceptions, there's nothing I can really do with Bitcoins at the moment. And yet it's closing in on $4000/coin. Does this make sense? No. Does it need to? Apparently not.
People are throwing their money into ICOs like madmen these days. Everyone is trying to get rich quick. Gridcoin, at its heart, seems to be an altruistic endeavor. And altruism doesn't really make one wealthy, so the coin languishes where it's at.
Personally, I want it to be worth at least enough to cover the cost of my electricity use, which is a non-trivial amount. But I honestly don't know how or if that's gonna happen.
Using my rig, I could be mining lots of other PoW altcoins, and making some amount of profit, even after electricity costs. But I just can't bring myself to do it. Sitting there grinding out meaningless hashes, 99.99% of which will be thrown away? No thanks. I'd rather fold proteins to help cure Alzheimer's, or find prime numbers which will help some future scientist/mathematician make some new discovery.
There are 3 "science" coins I know about at the moment; Gridcoin, FoldingCoin, and CureCoin. None of them are doing particularly well as a "coin", meaning as a store of value. What would be great is if somehow the scientific community themselves made these coins valuable, through suggestions like your own, paying for projects. Because then the rest of the world would say "Hey, those coins are worth something, so I'm gonna throw some mining hardware at a science project and get some!" And the coin, in a way, would end up "tricking" people into doing the right thing. They get money, science gets done. Win-win.
The fundamental technology behind Bitcoin, the blockchain, is replacing entire industries. Think about it this way: Bitcoin was developed with the specific goal of supplanting Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Venmo, Banks (literally banks), and it is succeeding. When you add these entities together you're looking at hundreds of billions of dollars worth of economic value. There are some very definitive reasons for the rise in the assumed value of Bitcoin -- the question is just what is the real price. It is almost certainly far higher than it is now. The next questions are: how long does it take to fully replace 3rd party financial institutions? and what will happen along the way?
I'm writing a longer response but I couldn't wait to put that out there =).
I completely agree it will have value in the real-world. But for now, it's really not "useable" in any sense, except speculation. None of these coins really are. But then again, these are early days, and much like pre-Internet, everyone is still figuring out what to do with this technology. The next few years will be really interesting.
idk captain, I buy more things with btc every day. Its adoption as a currency is moving along fairly quickly.
Wow, thanks, I stand corrected. I just did a lookup on who accepts bitcoin and I was shocked how many places did. I wasn't expecting to find that. So I suppose, getting back to the article, as long as bitcoin has value, and as long as there's a market to exchange GRC for BTC, then by association, GRC can have value too.
IMO bitcoin is a bit of a unique case in this sort of conversation. It was the first and every exchange uses it. It's the way most people enter the crypto world without mining. As a result it's essentially the gold standard for crypto (depending on who you talk to) which is where some of it's perceived value resides. It's the primary means by which you do other crypto business in the crypto sphere and as such has use as long as crypto has a use.