Gridcoin is a cryptocurrency that rewards for BOINC contributions which equals research activity on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).
Why mine when you can research?
Gridcoin is the answer to the problem any POW cryptocurrency has: The daily electricity consumption which is only used to run hashing algorithms that do not provide anything else except securing the system itself. So all the energy is used by the System for self-sustainability. Bitcoin uses 15 million US Dollar worth of electricity - EACH DAY (in 2013). What if you would use that enormous amount of electricity for a good purpose such as climate prediction, SETI or AIDS/cancer/malaria research? Gridcoin is doing that since 2013 - but it is still small, mostly unknown and COMPLEX to set it up.
PiGrid provides a Plug-n-Play solution to enter the ecosystem of BOINC and Gridcoin either via Raspberry PI (or similar) or a complete mining rig. Check out our kickstarter video:
In addition, our press release, feel free to copy that everywhere you like:PiGrid - get rewarded for helping research projects at home
Researchers already have technologies that can help in the fight against climate change and diseases. Yet, those technologies often depend on large computational ressources for simulation and validation. Now, a combination of innovations allows to incentivize progress.
In citizen science projects, each individual can volunteer to help. By devoting spare computing time to research groups everyone could "recycle" idle working time of any computing device for a good cause. BOINC[1] is a scientific network that has a paramount solution to manage the needed logistics: it distributes small work units to participating computers for calculation and collects their results later while maintaining scalability. On top of that, another innovation, Gridcoin[2], is able to reward participation in the BOINC network. Gridcoin uses a blockchain algorithm to achieve fast and secure payments in a global, energy-efficient network. While Bitcoin was consuming more than 15 Million US-Dollar in electricity each day[3], Gridcoin is able to strip energy waste and dedicate 98% of globally networked ressources to scientific tasks. This became possible by utilizing self-organizing properties of Bitcoin, asymmetric cryptography of Blackcoin[4] and Gridcoins advanced blockchain concepts in "proof-of-research".
Still, a remaining problem is user adoption. The setup of Gridcoin combined with BOINC is time consuming and tricky. This bars novices from easy access. In order to provide end users with a plug-n-play solution, PiGrid[5] has developed open-source software that works out of the box and takes care of all related configurations and updates. PiGrid can be used on existing hardware or bundled with pre-installed systems. A graphical user interface allows choice of research projects via drag-and-drop, monitoring of progress and tracking rewards in Gridcoin. The first generation of PiGrid solutions will be crowdfunded in this Kickstarter: http://pigrid.com/kickstarter
Below is a list of links for background information.
- short introduction to Gridcoin: http://uscore.net
- overview of BOINC: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/BoincIntro
- developer board of Gridcoin: https://cryptocointalk.com/forum/464-gridcoin-grc
- twitter: https://twitter.com/PiGrid_com
- Gridcoin documentation: http://wiki.gridcoin.us
We'd be glad to hear whether you consider to mention PiGrid in any news coverage. In case of specific questions, we are happy to answer your mail to press@pigrid.com. Thank you for your time!
Regards, PiGrid
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[1]: http://boinc.berkeley.edu
[2]: http://gridcoin.us
[3]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall ... -every-day
[4]: http://blackcoin.co
[5]: http://pigrid.com
