Competitive Advantages

General Advantages

One of the main advantages of Gridcoin is that crunching (“mining”) does useful scientific research. Crunching helps science in areas like fighting diseases, finding asteroids, understanding subatomic particles, and more. In other cryptocurrencies, mining doesn’t produce any meaningful results. This means that regardless of the number of Gridcoin you earn, crunching alone achieves something useful.

While there are some other cryptocurrencies that try and reward scientific work, they are limited in other various ways (most are heavily centralized among other things) see:

Additionally, Gridcoin’s system of scrapers (often called “oracles”) offers a scalable system that minimizes that amount of centralization. Scrapers get BOINC statistics (which determine rewards) from the projects and then compress them down to only the useful stats — reducing data sent and stored. The wallet compares the data from each scraper against each other limiting the trust needed. Scrapers are run by several trusted members of the community located around the world. Read more about scrapers on the Scraper Wiki Page

Scrapers and BOINC rewards are seperated from network consensus. Every Gridcoin wallet participates in network consensus, and it can proceed even without scrapers or any BOINC rewards whatsoever. Thousands of nodes staking with millions of coins are online every day participating in consensus, making Gridcoin more decentralized than many other cryptocurrencies.

Many blockchain projects try to do “everything” including smart contracts. Gridcoin does not support smart contracts, which helps keep the total chain size manageable (around 4.5GB after 10 years of operation). Smaller chain size means a “full node” can be run on consumer hardware, greatly increasing decentralization compared to chains like Ethereum which require enterprise-grade servers, bandwidth, availability, and coin investment. Gridcoin focuses on what it does best: rewarding scientific computing and being a cryptocurrency.

Further, Gridcoin has a voting system to help keep Gridcoin aligned with the community and have meaningful discussions. Voting helps reduce conflicts by not having unexpected changes and having a way to voice your opinion without needing to fork and split the community.

Comparison to CureCoin

What Is CureCoin?

CureCoin is a cryptocurrency that aims to reward folding@home work. Note you can earn Curecoin as the same time as Gridcoin for folding@home.

Why Gridcoin Is Different

  • CureCoin only rewards folding@home — Gridcoin rewards many projects
    • CureCoin is designed only for folding@home
      • Only one project can be rewarded
      • Expansion requires rework of the system
    • Gridcoin is designed for BOINC projects
      • Rewards many existing projects and allows for rewarding newly created BOINC projects
      • More rewarded areas of study and more scientists running and starting projects.

Comparison to Primecoin

What Is Primecoin?

Primecoin is a cryptocurrency that uses a proof of work algorithm to find Cunningham chains of prime numbers.

Why Gridcoin Is Different

  • Primecoin can only find prime numbers and do no other scientific computation
    • Limited by Proof of Work algorithm
      • Any expansion of Primecoin to other types of computations would need to fit a Proof of Work algorithm. These algorithms need abilities that many scientific problems lack
    • With Gridcoin more can be rewarded such as fighting disease, finding asteroids, and many other types of science

Comparison to Tokens

What Are These Tokens?

There are a variety of tokens that have tried/are trying to reward scientific work.

Why Gridcoin Is Different

  • Most of these tokens are heavily centralized
    • One person/group decides how they should be distributed
      • Many of these tokens have suddenly stopped because the people behind the projects decided to stop giving tokens out.
    • Gridcoin has systems in place to not give one person or group the ability to control distribution.
      • The Scrapers, Proof of Stake, and more allow for a much more decentralized system.
  • New tokens lack an existing community
    • Have to spend even more time on marketing, outreach, getting more developers, etc.
      • Have to overcome the chicken and egg problem for adoption
    • With Gridcoin, the community already exists
      • Able to help keep growth from it
      • Larger number of people to help with development, marketing, site building, and more
  • Tokens are limited in setting fees and changing other aspects
    • Tokens don’t run on their own network — limited by system of the network they run on
      • For instance for erc20 tokens on ethereum, to move tokens around you have to spend ethereum to do it with the fees from the ethereum network itself
    • Gridcoin runs on its own network
      • The fees can be changed if the community decides to
      • Other network level changes have and can be made