I invested in curecoin and then found out about gridcoin. Both are "help the medical world" coins. Which one has better LONG term prospects and why? Are there other coins in this sphere?
GridCoin has a large community with a diverse mix of projects, but it has some exploits in its history, and overall output of the BOINC network in terms of PetaFLOPs is about half that of Folding@Home. BOINC projects are hard to value. People are crunching 10x more RAC on MilkyWay than Rosetta@Home. It becomes a question of priorities. But certainly they have a larger platform to experiment on, like their Neural Network statistics server and the finance project they experimented with. Perhaps what makes GridCoin somewhat confusing to me (and I mine and hold it) is the eccentric relationship with bitcoin utopia whose RAC on the Gridcoin network exceeds the TOTAL out of the network by a factor of 40!
This was technically very hard to pull off, but it works and now with the recent addition of the pool (pool.gridcoin.co) it has also become easy for newcomers to mine/research. Gridcoin also works for many projects and not only a single project.
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edit: The reason why I think these "science coins" will become much more valuable is that it is very easy to convince people not in crypto before how good of an idea they are, see for example here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/4b4drk/a_currency_minted_by_doing_science/Agree with you and hats off - Gridcoin really has created an eco-system. I need to do some more due diligence - I've just been doing rosetta and gpugrid for the past year but haven't taken the time to determine how the payouts work. Since there are so many projects, I assumed it was weighted by the number of RAC completed on each project rather than evenly spread.
I also agree with using science coins to introduce crypto-currency outside the bitcoin bubble. If they don't get bitcoin's value proposition, thanks to science coins, they don't have to.
I can say that the one personal turn-off I've had to gridcoin has been the introduction of Bitcoin Utopia. After reading incessant fan-boy posts about it during its introduction (especially by some of the loudest voices on the Folding EVGA forum of all places?!) tied my stomach in knots. People supporting it were like middle-school bullies with a condescending tone - lots of "IMHO..." and "MY Project... Bitcoin Utopia...". The same people pushing for Bitcoin Utopia on Gridcoin / BOINC were condemning CureCoin on Folding@Home (that tone you probably recognize - "greedy cure coiners", and "coin's for folding, NO THANK YOU!" - which I thought was ironic since the primary goal is to get more science done. Anyway that's been my personal experience, and I never looked at Bitcoin Utopia since.