Note: I have around 5000 Gridcoin, so I may be biased in my view of the coin :)
This is one issue with crypto. It's hard to tell whether people hyping it own it because you believe in it or whether you believe in it because you own it.
I also mine Gridcoin. I don't know how much I have ATM, but I like that even when I'm away living my life, in some small part I'm helping a scientist find something new. The reward is just there to help with on boarding in my mind.
If the coin ever jumped in price and a few miners see it as an investment, well hey its better than mining bitcoin and producing less useful data.
It's hard to trust people in general, so that's why I left it in for more transparency. I think that's an issue that goes to more than just crypto too unfortunately. I'd agree that it's worse in the crypto world in general, however.
If you want some degree of evidence that I believe in the coin, you can take a look at some of the work I've done[1][2]. None of this can tell you anything with high confidence unfortunately with out any real knowledge of each other, so the best solution is not to take my complete word on everything. Most of the work I've done is on the site and wiki system (208 commits)[1], and I've done a little bit on the wallet itself (19 commits)[2], but my C++ abilities aren't the best, so not as much as the site.
Lastly, 5000 Gridcoin is really not a lot in comparison to most of the network, but still of course raises potential conflicts of interests. I know that it's still hard to trust anyone on this because there's a lot of shill type people in the crypto world unfortunately, so it's best to look at the system itself
[1] https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Gridcoin-Site/graphs/c... [2] https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Gridcoin-Research/grap...
Why does it matter? It shouldn't if you look at their arguments.