This time I will post some of my initial thougts and comments of what I've witnessed about Gridcoin in the last 90 days.
I have earlier been fiddling around with Bitcoin. Mostly faucets and such. Back then in the fall of 2016 I realised that I would never earn any easy money with Bitcoin. I know it was rather naive of me to think that I might just get lucky enough to solve a bitcoin block with my ridiculous hardware (Asus VM60 I5 2,8 Ghz quadcore)
I decided that I would look into another currency this time. I listed some criteria for the new currency.
- The value of the currency should be low
- The currency needed to have had some media coverage
- No "illegal" sounding name i.e. cannabis coin and such
- I needed to find a coin, that I could mine with my crappy old hardware ;)
Back in the day I used my computer's available ressources for SETI@Home. I heard about from my brother, who told me about it because I was an X-files tv show fan. So I joined SETI@home a couple of years back.
For me Gridcoin came as heaven sent!! I know it has been around for quite some time. But I had never heard about it before. But finally there was a coin that met my criteria.
I started mining just after christmas. I was really thrilled to finally combine my two hobbies!
I read somewhere, I believe it was here on Steemit, that I had to have an initial investment of GRC before I could go solo. So I decided to convert my old "savings" to GRC. Back when I claimed from faucets it was practically nothing. But with the BTC rate being so hight it had actually risen from 5 DKK ( a stick of cheap gum ) to around 550 DKK ( around a nice meal at a restaurant)
So what has happened since?
First of all I have come to the conclusion that GRC may not be the short way to riches. Especially not if I take the price of power consumption into the equation.
Second I found out that I could not expect to stake a block within a reasonable time frame with only 500 GRC. So I joined grcpool.com
Thirdly the value of GRC has been somewhat steadily falling since I made my "Investment" its less than half. But compared to BTC this is not such a big difference. My thoughts are that the rate of BTC influenses the rate of other cryptocurrencies a great deal. But I do also believe that the issues with forks has had a great impact on the rate, as it has prevented interested buyers of GRC, "some" if not all of their possibilities to exchange to GRC.
I would not suggest to anyone that I know, that they should invest in GRC. But I would not suggest anyone to invest in cryptocurrencies anyway.
But I believe that Gridcoin has the only truly viable mining strategy. When you come to the conclusion, that you do not get rich. You need to have another argument to keep on going. For me the philanthropistic way of still adding a much needed value to the scientific community is enough for me to keep on crunching.
But how can we expect the value of GRC to ever rise without the help of BTC with the current dillution of the value? When you have a set "Inflation" of 1.5% of all staking coins and then adding around 50,000 GRC everyday to the pool? It comes to a total inflation of 6.21% over the next year, or roughly 24.250.000 GRC
So that brings up the question: What is the primary drive of this coin?
Is it simply to raise interest for certain BOINC projects or is it to create a viable alternative to Bitcoin?
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't that the essential question the community has to ask it self?
I read a post a few days ago, where another steemit user made the claim that Gridcoin may just be the coin to get larger firms interested. This coin could be the coin of choice when large corperations decide to do something with the laptops, desktops and other equipment, that its employees forget to turn them off.
And he rightly made the comment that they may infact just choose to donate the "earnings" to non profit organisations and thereby receiving a tax deduction in the real world. That could possibly just turn out to give them some positive reviews among its customers. Or if the company is interested to get a slight decrease in the costs for the electric bill when the employees forget to turn of the computers GRC could also help out.
This argument is very intelligent.
But I believe in order to have a more steady and BTC independant exchange rate we need to solve the forking issues. When investors can't buy GRC they just choose another. Also they need to have some reassurance that their investment does not get dilluted buy an additional inflation of 5 percentage points just to make rewards for researchers.
I believe a more trustworthy exchange rate would make it easier to sell the idea to companies to try and join the gridcoin mining industry.
Maybe we should think about adjusting the APR to 1% and maybe only supply 50,000 GRC per roughly 1500 Blocks?
Just some food for thought.
Untill next time