Brilliant post.

To my mind, as much as I love Gridcoin it has one issue. That is that there is no way to use them other than trading, this in the long run will just devalue the coins as more and more are created.

Now using the coins to buy computing power as part of the funding of projects would be a great way to use/burn coins therefore reducing supply and creating demand.

E.g:

1. A project gets funding in GRC as you suggest or from buying GRC on the open market.
2. They trade some of the GRC on the open Market to fund equipment, staff etc.
3. They can use some of the GRC to pay us crunchers to carry out computational work for them on our equipment. This fund would be "burnt" at the rate new coins are being minted for these projects effectively recycling the coins and reducing supply.

New coins can still be minted through work on the whitelisted projects which are mainly non profit. But this enables a (profit making) organisation to buy computing power as well, they do this by buying Gridcoins. These could then be paid to a specific project address on the blockchain and are burnt at the rate that new coins are minted by crunchers of that project.

I really should put this into a post of my own rather than comment!!