You're entirely right about how companies chasing short term stock price gains often make terrible decisions for the long term, but I don't think it's a strong parallel to cryptocurrencies.

Price does not equal success for sure, but lack of adequate price does indicate a failure somewhere.

Back when Bitcoin came out I heard about it, but my impression was, "I'm crunching for science... I'm not going to pull my CPU off that to just generate heat."

The reality is that unlike 8-10 years ago, BOINC is not the only game in town. We're not the only ones vying for people's CPU and GPU time. Even altruists have to eat at the end of the day, and so the more profitable running BOINC is, the happier I am, because the more people will do it. As I mentioned, I have always and would always do it even without any monetary reward, but the reality is that many people would not.

Regarding the number of posts on Gridcoin's price, I only post them for new all time highs. It just so happens that Gridcoin is booming these past few weeks. I doubt my Gridcoin related posts surging up #crypto and #boinc have been hurting in that regard.

I would say, don't worry about the entire project being tainted by a couple of posts. If Gridcoin was so lacking in intrinsic value that a couple of price related posts would turn people off, we'd have much bigger problems on our hands.

I feel that anyone who looks at Gridcoin for a few minutes should be able to see this is something special. If price is what gets them in the door, that's okay with me, as long as they are dedicating their computing power to folding proteins or studying the stars, as opposed to running pointless hash calculations they might otherwise be doing.

Thank you for the calm discussion. I'm always nervous about challenging people on steemit. I always try to be respectful

Always respect your opinion @jringo. We don't always agree, but always respect! Reminds me of a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan :

There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.