What do you mean "do not return value"? Is donating your computing power to helping cure disease a return of value?
From an investor perspective I have done only cursory research so double check everything I say for yourself. Gridcoin is PoS, so owning gridcoins can gain you more gridcoins at I believe a rate of 1.5% per year. As a business they have a lot of room for growth: the BOINC network is huge and only .5% of BOINC users are earning through gridcoin, meaning most people donating their computing power are either not earning coins for it or have a different way of getting paid, but I suspect most are just doing it to help academic research and are paid nothing.
It's a pretty crowded space though, as I said at the top I have a lot of golem and I believe there are other competitors like iEX/SONM. I'm not going to personally invest money in it because of a few reasons:
- the returns from PoS are lower than returns I get loaning other coins on exchanges
- I can earn gridcoins by donating computing power so why do I need to buy them if I'm not doing PoS staking?
- crowded space like I said.
That said I'm not a trader, I have no idea what the price will be in X time, and I only own a handful of different cryptos currently. I probably should invest some into gridcoin as a hedge against golem, but that's not a great reason to invest imo.
There is a subtle but critical difference between GRC and other distributed computing platforms such as Golem etc.
With GRC, anyone can make a project and have it computed for free. The Gridcoin DPOR protocol then rewards crunchers with GRC. With competitors, an individual or entity must pay upfront for computing power. This creates massive limitations regarding who has access to the distributed computing power of the NN -- if I need to raise 1 million dollars, most likely through a risky ICO, before I can crunch, I'm not going to create my project. But if I can make my project and then get it processed for free, or even complete part of my project and begin that processing while developing the rest of my project... count me in!