You have a good point about the legality. The same can be said for Sia, I saw a post on Reddit that was basically 'if I share my spare computer space with someone holding illegal pornography the FBI won't care whether it's mine or not, by the letter of the law I'm guilty too'. Needless to say it got downvoted to oblivion :/
A lot of the projects are really cool ideas, but a lot of the communities, and maybe the developers too, are blind to the obvious legal concerns. I think it potentially stems from the type of people who buy into these projects. This is going to be a very controversial point, and I'm largely generalising, but I have tried to start up a few projects with very techie, computer-minded developer people; they were brilliant at the tech side, but had no appreciation of what it takes to make a successful business. I fear a lot of the current ICO type projects fall into similar categories.
Obviously, I'm generalising there and I'm sure not all developers are like that, but I recently got into LBRY and one thing that makes me very bullish is they seem to have this business sense. They literally have a CEO and CTO. It may not mean much, but as someone who knows business more than anything I find it rather comforting.
You've got me very intrigued about Gridcoin!
Cool, what we really want to do is inspire people to turn on their computer, download BOINC, find some project that they care about and start helping humanity by processing science.
Of course price support is valuable too, and if people want to throw up commercial projects then that's feasible and the Gridcoin team I believe would support it as long as its not ethically dubious; to be rewarded a project must be voted onto the whitelist, that vote occurs on the Gridcoin block-chain for full transparency.
I agree Sia has some problems there too, the only project using contracts that I have seen addressing the problems of regulatory compliance is Dharma.
The nice thing about Gridcoin is that Gridcoin itself rewards the people doing the work, no contract exists between the work requestor and the person processing it; so I think we don't have that legal issue.
Unfortunately I'm on the move all the time so my main computer is a chromebook, I don't have the power or capacity to process much outside of browsing!