Like any other cryptocurrency, you can just buy some Gridcoin and wait for the value to go up (and even earn a little interest via proof of stake) but the fun for me is in "mining" it. Instead of burning CPU cycles to mine the currency directly, you participate in various BOINC projects and are rewarded for the work your computers do.
BOINC started with just seti@home many years ago. seti@home is a project that searches radio telescope data for extraterrestrial signals. Now there are dozens of projects. My favorites are seti@home, einstein@home which searches for gravitational waves to identify pulsars, and rosetta@home which simulates protein folding to help find disease cures. However, there are many others.
Those interested can google for more info or go to https://gridcoin.us/ but the "mining" process goes something like this: 1) download and install BOINC, 2) during setup, select the projects you are interested in 3) For the project you select, join the Gridcoin team 4) download and install the gridcoin client, entering the appropriate info.
There is no reason for anyone who already uses BOINC not to participate, and if you don't use BOINC already it's a good excuse to look into volunteer computing.
10$ reserved for you as soon as i power down.
For readers:
I can chose more winners.