My First Month With Gridcoin - A Retrospective

It was just over a month ago that I started seriously diving into the world of cryptocurrencies and its been a wild ride since.

I initially set off to mine Ethereum because I wanted a coin with a use case. Smart contracts get the mediocre programmer in me excited and the future proof of stake switch also had me interested. Throwing flops at useless hashes was not my idea of a good time.

While I was waiting for my wallet to sync I kept reading about the different altcoins out there and eventually stumbled on Gridcoin. As you can imagine from my previous statement of "useless hashes" I was immediately sold. I closed out all my Ethereum activities and immediately set to getting BOINC running. Gridcoin is the most exciting thing I've seen in a long time. To understand why you'll need to know a bit more about myself.

I'm a semi-self-proclaimed rocket scientist by profession. I spend my days running numerical programs not too different from the ones on BOINC to solve engineering problems and sometimes those problems are on things that might end up in orbit.

Do I work on things like this? Well... sort of.

In my line of work there is ALWAYS a premium placed on computational power. There's never enough to do everything you want and whenever you have some extra money you spend it on trying to cram a few more CPUs into the closet down the hall. It always disappoints me when I think about the appalling amount of computational time spent on PoW coins like bitcoin. The things I could do with that much power are staggering. From genetic algorithms optimising the shape of anything and everything to understanding the fundamentals of turbulence to fully modelling and understanding the airflow around an aircraft. The possibilities are endless. Unfortunately those flops are spent minting digital gold. That is, until Gridcoin.

In it's current state my work does not lend itself well to a distributed platform like BOINC. We require large clusters of computers with many cores communicating very frequently. But, it does give me an appreciation for the staggering amount of computational power put together by BOINC and Gridcoin and the potential that it represents. Maybe one day the codes I use will be scaled in such a way that I can put them on a distributed network like BOINC. What a glorious day that would be. Until then I am more than happy to lend my computational cycles to the sciences that can break their monumental problems down into chunks that are easily digested by the average home computer. Make no mistake, the things some of these researchers are working on are truly monumental in both scope and impact.

But enough about me, back to the retrospective. How did my first week with Gridcoin go? Well, it was the first cryptocurrency that I put my own money into (twice!) I also spent my first month BOINCing 100% and discovered how to start paying attention to my electricity bill. The first one since starting BOINC nearly made my eyes pop! Electricity is a bit more expensive than I'd like here and rocket science doesn't pay as well as you might expect (all you out there with cheap electricity are the lucky ones.) I've since had to re-adjust my BOINCing strategy. Now I have it running when the computers are on being used for other things or the dog woke them up in the middle of the night. Doing as much science as I can reasonably afford and collecting a few Gridcoins ontop of that.

Who wants to do science? This guy does! Thats why he bumps into all the desks to wake up the computers in the house.

I'm looking for even more ways to contribute to the community. I might use my mediocre skills to code up a few utilities around Gridcoin or I might invest a few more dollars into the mix. All I know is I'm excited for where Gridcoin is going and where its going to take everyone else around it. Science is important, far more important than most of the populous thinks and I will continue to support it whenever and however I can.