It was just over a month ago that I started seriously diving into the world of cryptocurrencies and its been a wild ride since.
I initially set off to mine Ethereum because I wanted a coin with a use case. Smart contracts get the mediocre programmer in me excited and the future proof of stake switch also had me interested. Throwing flops at useless hashes was not my idea of a good time.
While I was waiting for my wallet to sync I kept reading about the different altcoins out there and eventually stumbled on Gridcoin. As you can imagine from my previous statement of "useless hashes" I was immediately sold. I closed out all my Ethereum activities and immediately set to getting BOINC running. Gridcoin is the most exciting thing I've seen in a long time. To understand why you'll need to know a bit more about myself.
I'm a semi-self-proclaimed rocket scientist by profession. I spend my days running numerical programs not too different from the ones on BOINC to solve engineering problems and sometimes those problems are on things that might end up in orbit.
Do I work on things like this? Well... sort of.
In my line of work there is ALWAYS a premium placed on computational power. There's never enough to do everything you want and whenever you have some extra money you spend it on trying to cram a few more CPUs into the closet down the hall. It always disappoints me when I think about the appalling amount of computational time spent on PoW coins like bitcoin. The things I could do with that much power are staggering. From genetic algorithms optimising the shape of anything and everything to understanding the fundamentals of turbulence to fully modelling and understanding the airflow around an aircraft. The possibilities are endless. Unfortunately those flops are spent minting digital gold. That is, until Gridcoin.
In it's current state my work does not lend itself well to a distributed platform like BOINC. We require large clusters of computers with many cores communicating very frequently. But, it does give me an appreciation for the staggering amount of computational power put together by BOINC and Gridcoin and the potential that it represents. Maybe one day the codes I use will be scaled in such a way that I can put them on a distributed network like BOINC. What a glorious day that would be. Until then I am more than happy to lend my computational cycles to the sciences that can break their monumental problems down into chunks that are easily digested by the average home computer. Make no mistake, the things some of these researchers are working on are truly monumental in both scope and impact.
But enough about me, back to the retrospective. How did my first week with Gridcoin go? Well, it was the first cryptocurrency that I put my own money into (twice!) I also spent my first month BOINCing 100% and discovered how to start paying attention to my electricity bill. The first one since starting BOINC nearly made my eyes pop! Electricity is a bit more expensive than I'd like here and rocket science doesn't pay as well as you might expect (all you out there with cheap electricity are the lucky ones.) I've since had to re-adjust my BOINCing strategy. Now I have it running when the computers are on being used for other things or the dog woke them up in the middle of the night. Doing as much science as I can reasonably afford and collecting a few Gridcoins ontop of that.
Who wants to do science? This guy does! Thats why he bumps into all the desks to wake up the computers in the house.
I'm looking for even more ways to contribute to the community. I might use my mediocre skills to code up a few utilities around Gridcoin or I might invest a few more dollars into the mix. All I know is I'm excited for where Gridcoin is going and where its going to take everyone else around it. Science is important, far more important than most of the populous thinks and I will continue to support it whenever and however I can.
Is it the living or the undead semi-self doing the proclaiming?
Love it! Nyark, nyark,nyark, snort, cough....
I'm only partially self proclaiming as opposed to only part of me fully self proclaiming. Chained hyphens are ambiguously delicious! And its the not yet decomposed bits doing most of the work :P.
I dont run 24 hours a day either, you really dont need to, the rewards scale fairly liniarly with run time. The only thing I run 24 hours is my raspberry pi which keeps my wallet staking 24/7 to support the network on a measly 3watts of power, I hope that soon will also be able to mine superblocks too.
welcome to the team :)
i have the same feelings! @work i am developing power plant optimization software and feeding databases like hell and i like very much to write computational software in free time @home. i always think at computation as a useful task. to consume the equivalent power consumption of Holland just to invert a hash is terrific!
Welcome! :)
Electricity bills are the only thing that stop me from going full madman with my hardware setup as well. I just started crunching with an odroid xu4 (pretty efficient) and now I think about powering it with solar. :)
Solar would be amazing to do to feed the boinc beast! It's on the list when I finally get tried of apartments but I'm not ready to give up that lifestyle quite yet.
I am currently in the same boat. I am a software developer and I am trying to think of something I could do to help out the community and make gridcon grow. If one of us comes up with something, maybe we can team up? :)
Welcome! Join us on slack if you ever want to toss around ideas for contributing.
Happy BOINCing!
A really great article, thank you for the good reading and welcome to Gridcoin! :)
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STOPI just got my first electricity bill. Ohh....so that's what running 4 1080 Ti's 24/7 looks like! Needless to say, I switched away from the tiered power plan to something better suited to my needs. I can crunch like a madman except for a period of 5 hours. I'll see if/how much that helps.
But hey, at least I know it's doing something useful . (although I do shut one card down occasionally to play computer games, which is also useful. :)