A recent message came through from Byteball regarding the payment (airdrop) of bytes for participation through byteball in the World Community Grid project. I have previously posted about this so felt an update now would be a good idea. The WCG project itself is excellent, with the aim of using people's spare computing power to perform calculations needed in medical research.
For several months now, I and a number of other Steemians have been crunching WCG and earning Byteballs. My personal income from a "nothing flash" PC and occasionally on my phone has been nice. My average earnings would have been in the order of 0.008 Gbytes per day. This equates to around $0.25 USD per day, basically passive income. I have regularly converted this into STEEM to boost my Steem account along.
As a financial source of crypto income, the program has changed dramatically.
The effect of this is basically a 90% drop in return. my last few payments have been 1/10th of what I had been getting, way less than the cost of electricity to run the program. Their message says it was never intended to be an income, but in effect it was. Now with the new reward schedule, this nice little earner is gone. From Byteballs side of things, I can totally understand why they have done this. The bytes they were giving out had grown with many people adding multiple computers to the network, and reaping rewards greater than traditional crypto mining. It was not sustainable for them to keep handing out so much of their reserves this way. Fully understand it, but, what to do now?
So, for those of us looking for a little bit of crypto income, what are our options now?
- I have heard of Gridcoin, which I believe is a coin rewarded for crunching on WCG but I am yet to do any research on it. I'd love to hear from anyone that knows how it works, and is involved with it.
- Go back to mining crypto like Monero.
- Something else?
- Keep as is and still feel warm and fuzzy about helping research, but without the bonus income.
I'd love to hear from other WCG crunchers as to what your plans are now moving forward.
Going to tag @flemingfarm as I know he joined up after a post of mine a while back, and I'm interested to see his opinion also.
Cheers,
John.