Introduction, and a newcomers experience with Gridcoin.

I see that an introduction is in place.

I'm a man in the late 40's, who has had distributed computing as a hobby for many years.
It has been fun and interesting to see how it has developed over the years, into the wonderfull being / monster that it has become today.
My first experience with distributed computing lies about 20 years back in time. The first distributed project I heard of was Distributed Net.
A project that is still alive today, allthough has perhaps lost some of its appeal. I joined, not so much because of the challenge of cracking the key (which I found rateher un-interestning), but because I found the thought of combining a lot off computers into "one", and do tasks this way was such a good idea.
It prooved itself later on, basically every crypto currency relies on distributed computing, but nobody back then had any ideas what / where it would end up at.

A few years later Seti@home came along in its "Classic" form, and I immediatly joined. I found the project inspiring then, and still do today.
After some years the BOINC project was launched, and Seti moved to the platform as the first project. They were sort off developed for each other.

Since then I have been researching many different things, allways just contributing, and never getting payed, allthough I have probably spend a rather large sum on the electricity and hardware to do so.
I see it as a chance for me to do a little good. If my computers can help cure cancer/aids/alzheimers/you name it or find ET, I think its worth the effort.

About 50 days ago, I decided to join Gridcoin.
I had a naive idea that I could make coins and donate them to SETI@home, so they could use them to upgrade their systems / infrastructure.

It would proove not be as easy as that:

First off all, you dont have a chance as a solo cruncher without coins in the wallet. You will basically never make any coins, ever....
The faucets that should help, dont pay much, so thats not a way to go.
After a few days I realized that I had to join a pool. So I joined GRCpool, and has been getting a few coins a day since then.
Besides the pool, I have been solo crunching a little, so that I could have a small magnitude, and keep being a researcher. Not the optimum way to make the most coins fast, but I like it this way, and do eventually get paid for this work too.
Now I have enough that I have just made my first stake, a very satisfying experience.
The plan now is to stay in the pool, until I am able to stake once or twice a week, and then I'll go solo.

And the plan is still to donate the surplus coins, when I have enough to stake regularly. I'll have to keep some, to keep up with the dificulty going up, but should be able to donate some of them.

I think I'm on the right path now :)

But I do have some remarks about Gridcoin.

I'm no dummie on a computer, and I work with IT as a part of my daily job. But still I have found Gridcoin extremely hard to get into.
There's basically not enough info out there, and much of it is outdated, or it contradicts itself. It is very easy to get confused and make poor decisions. Its also spread out and hard to find.
And the dificulty in getting coins is simply not a good thing. A coin that is promoted as a coin where you get paid for doing science, should be paying peoble for doing science....
Not have a lot of hurdles that you should overcome.
If you do Boinc, and install Gridcoin, coins should start coming to you. It does'nt have to be a lot, but there should be some rewards.
Peoble give up when they meet the fact, that you either have to invest some real money (which is not easy in itself for a newcomer), and many don't like the idea of having to join a pool.

So some peoble simply give up on the idea, and thats bad, as Gridcoin relies on having many active users.

And then there is the latest instability with the release of the new client, and the hard fork some days ago. Since then the network has been one big mess, forking all the time, and things seems to only be getting worse.
Not very comforting to a newcomer. And there has been close to zero info on the subject, if users should be worried, is it getting fixed etc etc.
I'm on the latest version, 3.7.5, but i can see my wallet go off on forks constantly, and all the stats pages, faucets, and even GRCpool are unstable / offline because of the state of the Gridcoin net.
I find it worrying :)

Maybe I'm being a bit too harsh, but I really think these things are things that needs looking into.

This became a long post, sorry :)

When you have a lot you feel you need to say, its hard to write short messages...