roboticmind

I'll admit it's not great right now, but I don't know if I understand what you view as a use case? If using it to get things of value with it is not a use case, then what coin or currency has any use case? Everything is a transfer of value even beyond just currencies be it paid in time or other things

> Reward paid in, let me guess, more coins. self fueling like most other coins. Thats not a real usecase

It's also worth noting that you don't have to go through it if you use a pool, and there's work on making it not require pools if you don't want to start out with any Gridcoin. If you look up Gridcoin and "Manual rewards claim" you'll find some of the discussion about it.

> so it has religion-like properties, awesome /s not a use case

I was thinking more in terms of some of the reasons why Gridcoin's developers have Gridcoin - not necessarily advocating for others to do the same. I should have clarified that I didn't think this was a use case

I should also mention that having Gridcoin helps you in polls. Gridcoin has a system of polls and the polls are weighted by how much work you do in BOINC and how many coins you have. Note that it's your amount of those before a poll so you can't try to gain more influence after learning of a poll. It of course has its own issues and discussions about how or if votes should be weighted

As one of the commenters mention, it's an issue with all cryptocurrencies. Right now one of the reason people want to get Gridcoin is to get enough to stake regularly to earn their rewards or because they believe in the coin. In the future, there's been some ideas floating around that I think are very interesting. For instance, one idea that's been floating around is to create a service that accepts GRC and offers assistance to researchers for setting up a BOINC project

The oracles don't have the power to completely run everything. With the current split for rewards, 25% of new coins is from just staking. As well, because new blocks are made only proof of stake, a 51% type attack would be also be much tougher for the oracles conspire and to pull off. Even if they tried to redirect 100% of research rewards (28750 GRC/day) to one address, it would take over 900 days to even reach the same amount as the address with the largest balance (~6% of current coin supply) [1].

Further, there's also more resiliency. If the oracles somehow broke or conspired and all said everyone did zero work, the network would still run. Now granted it would not be great that only previously pending research and PoS rewards would be given out, but you could still send coins, run polls, etc.

[1] https://main.gridcoinstats.eu/address/ (excluding the very largest one (the foundation) because it's multisig and can't stake. In its case it would take 1000 days to reach)

For those that are wondering how this works, Gridcoin uses PoS - not PoW - and then rewards for research on top of it. It is not locked into any algorithm because it's not PoW. There are currently 18 different BOINC project [1] that it rewards. New projects can be voted in or can be voted off.

To try to reduce the centralization, there is a system of oracles that gathers the stats from each project and the nodes verify that the oracles match each other. As well, each project only consists of 1/18th of the rewards [2] from research and there's also new coins rewarded for just staking, so if a project acts up, they wouldn't be able to largely manipulate coin supply.

If you have any more questions about it, feel free to ask me

[1] https://gridcoin.us/guides/whitelist.htm

[2] https://gridcoin.us/wiki/magnitude.html

Note: I help work on the gridcoin.us website and have ~5000 Gridcoin, so I may be biased in my view of the coin :)

The coin is proof of stake based. The rewards for BOINC come on top of staking. Each BOINC project that is rewarded has its stats looked up by a system of oracles and each node verifies that the oracles match up. The project themselves can be removed if they act up and there's a system for voting on which project to add and remove

If you have any more questions feel free to ask me or check out the Gridcoin website https://gridcoin.us

Note: I help work on the gridcoin.us website and have ~5000 Gridcoin, so I may be biased in my view of the coin :)