Sure, it is viable to mine. We just had another massive price boost overnight, and I think we will be at or near USD$0.10 by the end of the month.
The value in the coin is twofold:
- It is a token to represent contributions to research (relevant within the community)
- It can be used by external researchers to incentivise compute by 'raining' GRC on everyone doing the compute work. Essentially, Gridcoin lets anyone buy compute on an existing infrastructure. Think Golem, but it already exists and has had 15 years of back-end development.
You can definitely use Gridcoin externally - it can be turned into whatever you like on an exchange, or used directly on (currently a very small) selection of websites. The community also often trades it internally for Paypal, etc.
For your computer's revenue estimate I would need some specs. Open your start menu, type 'run'. Then open the run window and type 'dxdiag'. First tab has your CPU, second tab has your GPU.
Great. Kind of you. Here are the screenshots.
Ok, so you have an i5-6200U CPU running at 2.30GHz, and an integrated graphics chip. I assume this is a laptop based on the computer name and that being a low power CPU?
Unfortunately, laptops carry some very underpowered hardware relative to desktops, so are not very good at doing research jobs that earn Gridcoin. You would earn maybe 1 GRC/day. It is also important to consider that laptops overheat very easily, so you may not be able to run it to capacity.
Correct, it is a laptop. Thank you very much for your guidance. I´ll keep reading here, and I´ll let you know if I make any progress in this regard.