I cannot see how RSC could ever be valuable.

Ripple Labs have ended their computing for good distribution program because it was progressively debasing XRP.

Research supporters donate their spare CPU to WCG anyway. While everyone would prefer a retribution, this leads to a tragedy-of-commons situation: "they give me something for practically no additional effort, so any positive amount is good enough".

RSC are IOUs backed by nothing. They do not even exist outside Ripple. They are not accepted anywhere. Their only value derives from that research support promise, but then again the 40% premine defeats this purpose. For example, let us say I am a wealthy research supporter. I already save enough taxes from my other donations, so I will instead give money to informally organized scientific computing projects on the internet. I can choose between two options:

- I can buy RSC, effectively donating to other supporters to retribute their WCG computations. They will get only 60% of my money, and many of them would have donated their spare cycles anyway.

- Or I can setup an inexpensive, massive digitalocean botnet to run WCG myself. WCG lets me select which projects I prefer. I will even get some RSC for doing this!

Who would ever prefer the first option over the second? In other words, what stops RSC price from falling to 0?