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Good Morning, Gridcoin!
I was sipping my morning coffee (I swear it gets stronger every day), trawling the news, when I stumbled upon the following article on Bloomberg: "A Prime Number Could be the Answer to Bitcoin's Power Problem"
I clicked through and discovered a rather pleasant surprise - the journalist makes explicit mention of Gridcoin, painting the project in a wonderfully positive light! The article notes how Gridcoin aims to solve "real world problems" - awarding Gridcoin to users for directing computing power towards important scientific projects through BOINC. What's more - the article links to the gridcoin.us wiki, meaning any potential readers are but a small click away from getting involved themselves - great!
I'll admit - it genuinely put a smile on my face to see Gridcoin receiving a little mainstream exposure. This project has the potential to help advance research in any number of important fields, all whilst using the spare computing cycles of devices that might otherwise be sitting idle, or worse - be thrown out when they're deemed obsolete or damaged.
However, it also got me thinking about what brought me to Gridcoin in the first place and - importantly - what it is that keeps me crunching!
My GRC Origin Story
#GRCoriginstoryAs I've mentioned before - I'm a designer / Marketing guy that turns his hand to pretty much any creative endeavour the boss requires - from scale model building to interior design to photography, set building - the list goes on. That's just my day job though, my... Cover story, if you will. But the full story? Take a seat by the campfire - let me enlighten you...
...Alright, okay, it's not as mysterious or secretive as I'm making out! For my part in the GRC story I rescue old / partially damaged laptops, computers and phones from being dumped - repurposing them as research machines. Sure, these devices don't have the processing power of a beastly gaming rig, or a ridiculously cool research lab (looking at you @dutch!), but they contribute what they can to help cure cancer, solve the world's health and sustainability problems, map the universe, find pulsars... and more. I feel it's what they'd want - our devices were designed to be used, after all!
But most importantly - doing this fills a science-shaped hole in my life that would otherwise go unfulfilled. As a kid I had grand dreams of becoming a scientist, inventor, researcher, explorer - you name it, I probably gave it a go... With varying levels of success and disaster.
An accurate depiction of my childhood - burns and all. I mean really, who buys an eight year old a chemistry set and a soldering iron? Looking at you Mum & Dad...
Alas, 'twas not meant to be - my shortcomings with concentration / attention (and a penchant for doing anything but what I was meant to be doing) led to me dropping out of my Physics degree and following a somewhat more random path through life into creative endeavours.
But - participating in Gridcoin, BOINCing, even throwing together new designs to help rebrand and promote the project - all of these things rekindle that childhood love of science and help me feel like I'm contributing. This is what brought about the idea of the "Secret Identities" campaign mentioned a while back - we're not all scientists in our day jobs, but through our secret Gridcoin / BOINC lives? We kinda are! That's what keeps bringing me back to Gridcoin - the opportunity for anyone, and I mean anyone, to be able to contribute in some small (or large) way to STEM endeavours.
To be fair, also a pretty accurate representation of my current direction in life
What about you?
So to you, dear reader, I ask - what's your secret identity? Tell us your #GRCoriginstory! I get the feeling that our community is full of fascinating individuals from all walks of life - so let's tell some of those stories! I'd love to make this a recurring thing - taking a little time in the morning to tell the story of one of our community members and help spread the word that...
(Wow, that was cheesy. Note to self, get better at coming up with catchphrases.)
A few questions to get you started:
- What's your 'cover story'? What do you do as your day job? (Be as vague or as detailed as you like!)
- What brought you to Gridcoin and BOINC in the first place?
- Have your BOINCing efforts resulted in any discoveries?
- Are you a super-researcher with fancy equipment (please show us your setup if you are so we can fawn over it!), or do you use humble desktops, computers and phones to BOINC?
- Any interesting or novel stories to tell?
- Any exciting projects on the go?
I look forward to reading your stories!
-- Josh
So my #GRCOriginStory starts many years ago, when I was young and virile, ok we can skip some of that ;)
Then I heard about another type of BOINCing that helps science. I started running some projects I forget now what they were, I think Rosetta may have been one, and I was on SIMAP for a long time.
I heard about Bitcoin around 2012, and I was tempted to try mining, but I couldn't divert my computer from BOINC work, for an experimental currency project. I forgot all about Bitcoin.
Then in early 2014 Id heard about the $1,000 Bitcoin price, and I started thinking about it from time to time, but PC mining was already gone by then. I was idly Googling in Summer of 2014 and must have put 'bitcoin boinc' in because Gridcoin came up.
WOW! So I was going to get in on some of this, thought I. I downloaded the client, but I couldnt get it to sync (if you think its complicated now, you should have tried it then!), and anyway 50% was still based on hashing, so I wasnt to bothered about cutting my BOINC contributions in half. I forgot all about it.
For some reason that little seed kept growing in my mind, if only we could reward BOINCers, we may be able to attract a lot of nerds who were getting into Bitcoin. So in January 2015 I tried again, Gridcoin was changing, it was transitioning to PoS, whatever that was, but it only used 1% CPU and the rest was directed at BOINC
WOW
Now Im super keen, so I buy some Gridcoin Classic, and burn it for Gridcoin Research (the GRC of today), and on the 25th Jan 2015 I had mined my newbie stake block, as we called them in those days.
And as they say dear reader, the rest is history!
That's really cool. Thanks for sharing
Thank you for telling your story @scalextrix! I'm glad you persevered with it :) I imagine things were difficult back in the early days - I remember how much trouble I had with Bitcoin mining back then.. like you said, not worth diverting your computer from BOINC work!
Very glad you persevered with it, staked your newbie block and became a large contributor to this community - thank you for taking the time to reply!
I never had any interest in online communities before Gridcoin, I didn't crunch in a BOINC Team, no Faceberk profile, no Twotter etc.
I hit gold on the first try, and to this day I've never regretted being part of Gridcoin. fabulous people, and even as we are growing to the 10,000 people, its still feels nice and freindly.
I think Gridcoin is underestimated not only because of its uncommon technology and goals, but because the community clearly demonstrated that crypto can be kind; people who like crypto arent all dark web nasties.
Very well said!
My #GRCOriginStory:
I've always been interested in computers and science, even though I ended up in the engineering field... Sometimes I like to think of it as "applied science." :^)
I started crunching for distributed.net in 2001, as i recall. SETI@Home was next - I still remember when they updated the screensaver to show more detailed workunit status. When SETI shifted to BOINC, I immediately realized how this could enable many more projects to harness the power of volunteer computing. Little did I know how true that would become!
After 14+ years of crunching, I was thinking about cryptocurrencies, specifically that I still need to work to get money after missing the boat on Bitcoin, Etherium, and Ripple. At the time (2012 and 2014 for BTC, 2016 for ETH and XRP) I either "didn't have time" to set up crypto, or felt nervous about sending bank account routing info to a sketchy exchange in a sketchy country. OOPS. I'll have to wait a little longer to buy a private island, I guess.
Much like other users have experienced, a random search led me to Gridcoin. This time would be different! I set up a wallet in October 2017, but not without some difficulty. Thankfully, the developers and community are fantastic, and helped walk me through troubleshooting and eventually advertising the beacon. I think that I even "found" a bug in version 3.6.2! Not fun, but it showed me how great the developer community is.
The original intent was to start from scratch, solo mining without joining a pool. Unfortunately those days are long gone, so I bought a little BTC (big mistake) to trade for GRC, which was probably my best decision of 2017!
Today I'm proud to be a part of this growing community, and have recruited two more friends to the cause. I help them set up everything, join BOINC, and loan some coins to get them staking. I hope to give back a little of the positive spirit and camaraderie that make this probably the best crypto project around.
Now to get more cores :^)
First up - a belated welcome aboard for October 2017 and thank you for sharing your story :)
Nice to see another old-school cruncher joining the community - I remember running that SETI screensaver back when it came out in the late 90s and have fond memories of watching it (very slowly) process the WUs! What kind of setup do you run these days? I'm always on the hunt for more cores - though it seems like the devices I use are ever-changing as old ones finally give up on me or I manage to fix broken devices and bring them back online :)
I think the dev community for Gridcoin really shines when it comes to troubleshooting. I love that if you get stuck or find a bug there's always someone available who can help you out - it's usually the person that wrote the code in the first place too, so they know what they're talking about! Have you got your wallet updated to the latest version? There's some fantastic work gone into speeding it up and stabilising it since the last major release :)
Thanks again for sharing!
Wallet is updated to 3.7.1, soon to be 3.7.2... thanks to @ravonn, @caraka, @ifoggz, @jringo, @barton26, @tomasbrod, and all the others that I might not know about working hard to improve the community :^)
I have a few old laptops crunching WCG, but now also a NUC, Raspberry Pi, an old Dell tower (space heater) to warm up my bedroom in the winter, and my work laptop (sshh!)
Just got my buddy signed up and he staked last week - I must admit some envy of his 32 core home server, but glad to bring him back to BOINC!
Holy-.. a 32 core home server? Yeah, I'm jealous! I'd be tempted to get a more serious setup at home, but.. I think the girlfriend might not be overly thrilled 😂. Perhaps I can spin it as a low-cost alternative to heating the house with gas? That works, right?
I'm using a free old i5-650 with hd7570 (dell rebrand) gpu to warm my bedroom a little bit - it just takes the chill off, but with a magnitude of about 10 more than pays for itself. it keeps the aquarium heater from turning on so often. The next step is to rig an arduino temperature sensor and watercooling setup to directly warm the aquarium with waste heat, if I ever get around to it. Put your space heater computer under the bed, it captures the heat in the most important place and helps block the fan sounds!
Ah wow, that'd be an inventive way of heating the aquarium! You'll have to share some photos of the setup if you get it working, sounds like a fun project!
Now that's a good idea - the real LPT is always in the comments :)
It turns out that with the desktop running in my room 24/7, the temperature is about 22C (72 degrees F in Freedom Units) . So far I haven't seen the 100W aquarium heater turn on. The outside temperature at night is about 10-12C normally here in "winter," and about 15C indoors, so I'm going to call this a win :)
My story started late 2008 when i first bought a gaming pc and they included a paper with info about folding, that i could use my pc to help science to cure cancer, alzheimers and so on. This was an awesome way to let people help as volunteer with no knowledge needed for bio science.
I installed application and fire it up right away and notice after a few minutes that my radeon 4870X2 would make be go nuts as it put loud noise in room.
So let it run for a short time and told to my self that i would be back when i got better cooling. Around 2 years later i upgraded pc with 7870 which had custom fans on it and fire up folding once again but this time i spread cpu load for boinc and keep gpu to Folding at home. At this time i was sure that would work better and get involved and started to look up papers for science they published.
After some time with great contributions there was a lot of info about bitcoin and you could use gpu to mine and i was thinking why would they use that when we could use it for science and do real work. It end up testing it so got in a random pool and let it run for 1-2 days and was then clear to never do that again. Back to folding and one day Curecoin appear so i was jumping into it and then i saw Gridcoin team at project Denisathome which use boinc. This time i started to look up more info about CPUs and started to learn more and got a 4 socket opteron that was build to do folding "big adv workunits". As GPUs have taken over the folding i set the rig up for Denis and soon after that build others computers big and small from nucs to xeons.
Gridcoin with wide spread of great project that was in huge need of help made me to grow and was now addicted to boinc and combination of in my view a perfect use of cryptocurrency.
Great story - thank you for sharing @gunde! Man, I remember how noisy those 4870s were - I'm so grateful things have become more efficient and quieter these days... Though I was never great at planning out my cooling, so that might explain a lot!
Really cool that your gaming PC came with info' on folding. I remember back in the day even Sony supported Folding@home on the PS3 - real shame they stopped! Perhaps we can convince them to get BOINC running on the PS4, though somehow I doubt it ;)
Glad you found your way to Gridcoin! I was very much like you - tried Bitcoin mining back in 2012, but found it rather wasteful and ended up directing my processing power back to BOINC. Sounds like you have a really decent rig / setup now too - would love to see it if you have any pictures!
I'm a middle class worker bee that's has gaming and sporting to stay in shape as a hobby.
Not very much more can be said hah.
The time for gaming has been placed on the backburner because of the time constraints and responsabilities adulthood and having a wonderful wife and kids bring. Time that can be more used for the boinc program.
I have been boincing since 2006, when I scoured the net how to bring a personal contribution against cancer without having to study for a doctorate in oncology.. or astrophysics 😊.
For hardware nothing fancy like server racks etc;
just a i7 laptop and a lot of handicapped phones I got from family that I use for boincing, I like the idea repurposing valuable but worn things like phones instead of just throwing something away.
Ahh I know what you meant about the responsibilities of adulthood - my gaming time has mostly been replaced with DIY time / BOINC time too :). I'd love to find ways to further gamify the BOINC / Gridcoin experience - if only I had the coding skills to do it!
Good to see someone that's been BOINCing for so long here :) how did you find out about Gridcoin if you don't mind me asking?
Handicapped phones are great - they may not contribute the most computing power, but like you say - at least they aren't being thrown away! I have all manner of 'junk' laptops and phones here - damaged screens, network blocked, missing batteries.. if I can get them powered on and functional enough, then you can be sure I'll get them crunching! :)
Me too man, I wish I studied something in IT since i'm fiddling with computers half of the time.. 😄
You did some very good looking art on GRC though. By the way: I hope you didn't mind I used some of your artwork for my gridcoin scribblings on steemit here.
Running boinc wasn't a constant thing but last summer it was that time again to install Boinc, when I traded my desktop for a laptop, I stumbled on gridcoin when I was reading up on news for boinc on google. And I found Steemit through Gridcoin there after and traded some author rewards for a bit gridcoin.
I got a lot of unresponsive broken glass phones, they can be accessed with a mouse if you have a usb to micro usb adapter. They're weirdly hard to come by though but exist.
Thank you for your article and sharing the link @joshoeah. This is the PR Gridcoin and BOINC need to further gain visibility and acceptance as sustainable alternative to Bitcoin.
Great read! And amazing #GRCOriginStory.
The Bloomberg article put a smile on my face this morning as well, but so did yours. It is an amazing feeling to know that you are contributing to make the world a better place, particularly when it can seem that there is so little that can be done without endless resources.
Rescuing all those precious minerals that would just as soon be thrown away and using them for data analysis is a prime example of a use-case of Gridcoin and BOINC.
Thank you for everything, Josh.
We really, REALLY, need more public exposure like this, not just for GRC but to paint the whole cryptomarket in a better light.
As a BOINCer I am a bit biassed, but so much wonderful stuff could be done with all that processing power and electricity. I hope the current situation the world has gotten itself into will push people to think more of general well being then just amassing wealth, but my hopes are low... With every passing day, with every new reality show, with every new Trump statement we just seem to lower what our expectations are of us and other human beings. So we need more positive projects like this, and try and market them more, not just online, but in person to all our friends.
Absolutely - I think the temptation is to underestimate how many folks would love to get involved in something positive and rewarding like this. I've spoken about it in person with friends who I thought would have no interest, only for them to get even more sucked in than I am :). Next step - convincing my parents to get involved...
Ha ha, my Mum is 78 years old but she is quite tech savvy for her age and uses her computer every day, when her old computer broke I gave her my i7-3700k (excuse to upgrade!) and asked if when she was using it she would like to run BOINC; when I explained she could contribute to projects like WCG she was very happy so long as I managed it for her.
First step is to get Mum onto Steemit I think... This is probably more her bag - she's into all kinds of creative endeavours and would love the opportunity to share her work with a wider audience. I'm sure she'd be readily convinced to donate her computing power, too - provided, as is your case, I manage it for her :)
Yeah sounds like a no brainer, just help her keep her keys safe
I don't hold a lot of GRC yet, but I like this coin best out of them all. I started using BOINC long ago but didn't keep at it. Over the years i'd let it run a few months, stop, then try again a year later. I figure if I put some of my cash in it, i'll be more motivated to continue the work and watch GRC grow.
For sure :) I find the hardest thing is to not get addicted to finding more and more devices to BOINC on once you get into it... even my phone crunches while I sleep now, since it's on charge anyway - it might as well be doing something useful!
Thanks for sharing your story - good luck with your future crunching!
GOOD MORNING @joshoeah
Great Title "Good Morning, Gridcoin!' Compelled me to read full post
Thank you, and thank you for taking the time to read!
In my city its evening :P
Haha whoops! Perhaps I'll need to schedule my next post to hit morning where you are :) though to be fair, it's barely morning here in England now!
There are many different ways of contributing to science. Glad you seem to have found your way :)
Cheers, and thanks to all the effort you put into it!
Very true - I'm thankful for the opportunity to contribute that projects like BOINC / Gridcoin provide. Unfortunately, studying science was always like trying to put a square peg into a round hole for me :)
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