If you haven't heard about Gridcoin, it is a new cryptocurrency that provides real benefits to humanity by compensating the coin miners for participating in BOINC projects that will lead to advances in medicine, biology, mathematics, science, climatology, and astrophysics by concentrating a large percentage of the computational power towards BOINC research - instead of generating unnecessary heat and wasted power for the proof of work algorithms required to keep the coin network running. While Gridcoin is a scrypt based coin, the block reward is dynamically based on the miners participation in BOINC research. A miner that does not participate receives a reward of 5 GRC while the miners that are participating the most resources receive 150 GRC per block. The average users would receive some amount in between. The coin will operate independently if there is a problem with BOINC eliminating any centralization issues. The devs of Gridcoin have recently proposed offering a finance project that would be involved in a number of financial aspects including options market analysis. This would allow miners to participate in the first cryptocurrency powered quant fund. The possibilities are truly limitless when imagining what could be created with the processing power used in the cryptocurrency market and Gridcoin is leaps and bounds ahead of the rest. https://cryptocointalk.com/topic/11357-gridcoin-finance-project/
Bitcoin Magazine: Putting the Blockchain to Work For Science http://bitcoinmagazine.com/13187/putting-the-blockchain-to-work-for-science-gridcoin/
Gridcoin White Paper: http://www.gridcoin.us/images/gridcoin-white-paper.pdf Major update released for revamped CPU mining: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=324118.msg6953412#msg6953412
When people realize how much power is wasted mining BTC/LTC... and its only gonna get worse. This is the coin that does something about that.
Gridcoin is still in its infancy and will gain more media attention as it grows. It will be major news when the Gridcoin network becomes the top contributor to BOINC. Most will jump on the bandwagon then but the best opportunity for price appreciation is by investing well before that time. I think Gridcoin will be one of the top altcoins within a couple years.
It is estimated that the Bitcoin network is currently using in excess of 76,000MWh a day of electricity on hashing sha256 alone. What Gridcoin wants to do is taken even if itâs a little portion of that essentially wasted resources and put it towards distributed computing (BOINC) which would benefit a wide variety of fields of studies such as medicine, biology, climatology, mathematics, and astrophysics, just to name a few. http://bitcoinist.net/gridcoin-pow-for-boinc/
Phhfff... if that is your argument: then you should select pure POS (proof of Stake) coins: those don't use any energy what so ever, and thereby much and much better than Gridcoin (which is still a POW coin). For good POS coins look at: NXT and Blackcoin (and a lot of copycats of those two). Edit: I just found out that Gridcoin uses Scrypt algorithm for its ProofOfWork: well...?... Scrypt is the MOST inefficient algorithm of all (produces even more heat than Bitcoin's Sha256).... If Gridcoin is really so concerned about energy-efficiency than it should have selected other algorithms like: X11, Qubit or Groestl....(those are 50% better)
Instead of going with POS, Gridcoin created a new and more specific solution. Gridcoin not only has scrypt POW but also has a CPU mining side that is solely based on contribution to BOINC research. This is the purest way for people to participate in Gridcoin since the blocks mined are directly based on their credits per BOINC project. This is a completely new system called POB (proof of BOINC). Half of the blocks are created/mined by CPU/POB and the other half by scrypt/POW. This was designed to not be fully reliant on the BOINC infrastructure and eliminate any centralization issues. The appropriate hashing algo for the scrypt side was debated thoroughly by the dev team. The efficiency of the hashing algos you mentioned was only comparing their GPU efficiency. There are currently scrypt asics that are readily available and are much more efficient overall than using another GPU only algo. This also frees up all GPUs to be used for BOINC scientific research with is the main goal of Gridcoin.