My story started late 2008 when i first bought a gaming pc and they included a paper with info about folding, that i could use my pc to help science to cure cancer, alzheimers and so on. This was an awesome way to let people help as volunteer with no knowledge needed for bio science.
I installed application and fire it up right away and notice after a few minutes that my radeon 4870X2 would make be go nuts as it put loud noise in room.
So let it run for a short time and told to my self that i would be back when i got better cooling. Around 2 years later i upgraded pc with 7870 which had custom fans on it and fire up folding once again but this time i spread cpu load for boinc and keep gpu to Folding at home. At this time i was sure that would work better and get involved and started to look up papers for science they published.
After some time with great contributions there was a lot of info about bitcoin and you could use gpu to mine and i was thinking why would they use that when we could use it for science and do real work. It end up testing it so got in a random pool and let it run for 1-2 days and was then clear to never do that again. Back to folding and one day Curecoin appear so i was jumping into it and then i saw Gridcoin team at project Denisathome which use boinc. This time i started to look up more info about CPUs and started to learn more and got a 4 socket opteron that was build to do folding "big adv workunits". As GPUs have taken over the folding i set the rig up for Denis and soon after that build others computers big and small from nucs to xeons.
Gridcoin with wide spread of great project that was in huge need of help made me to grow and was now addicted to boinc and combination of in my view a perfect use of cryptocurrency.
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Great story - thank you for sharing @gunde! Man, I remember how noisy those 4870s were - I'm so grateful things have become more efficient and quieter these days... Though I was never great at planning out my cooling, so that might explain a lot!
Really cool that your gaming PC came with info' on folding. I remember back in the day even Sony supported Folding@home on the PS3 - real shame they stopped! Perhaps we can convince them to get BOINC running on the PS4, though somehow I doubt it ;)
Glad you found your way to Gridcoin! I was very much like you - tried Bitcoin mining back in 2012, but found it rather wasteful and ended up directing my processing power back to BOINC. Sounds like you have a really decent rig / setup now too - would love to see it if you have any pictures!