yes, it hits 69M earlier today. Tomorrow it will break 70M.

So you're saying to forget Bitcoin, the most mined criptocurrency in the world? It's really important do something more useful with the power used mining Bitcoin, don't care if exist other coins with this purpose. Bitcoin is the most used criptocurrency and probably will continue, we can deny and forget this.

It hits 4.7 this morning, you can check the chain history.

difficulty is finally more than 4 because more Chinese know this coin.

Hashrate the first time reach 60M, towards 70 today.

Boinc

That is exactly what I said... GridCoin pays out a larger block reward to miners that run BOINC software while mining. Okay, nice. But that doesn't change the fact that BOINC is in no way integrated into the operation of the coin. You're essentially renting out computing power while simultaneously mining. The power consumption of GridCoin mining with BOINC will be higher than the power consumption of just mining a coin or just running BOINC. No progress was made towards making the Proof-of-Work function contribute results that are meaningful outside securing the blockchain.

Even if this has been discussed many times, I couldn't agree with the sentiment more.

The insane amounts of computing power being developed could be put towards curing cancer, and AIDS, and other folding@home projects.

Obviously saying "BOINC runs in the background" is pointless, because the point of this thread is dedicating 100% of the computing power to BOINC.  Not idle time background power.

If you want to get rich, find a way to take the obsolete mining equipment and put it to use with BOINC.  

There must be some way.  Even if its just providing a service that collects / buys mining rigs from people, so they don't get split up, sold on ebay, or tossed in the trash.

Bitcoin is going to fuel computing power innovation like we've never seen in the history of computing.  

I realize mining technology doesn't equal BOINC technology ... but what a waste if we can't harness the old hardware for BOINC.

Gridcoin is a good initiative https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=324118.0

However I think it just too complicated right now, you have to be mining their scrybt coin and then at the same time you have to run the BOINC client and then the block reward is dependent on your BOINC client utilization.

They should just build the gridcoin mining into the BOINC client period, that way everyone that participates in the world community grid network gets rewarded with gridcoins

The problem of combining useful computation with a proof-of-work blockchain is far from trivial.

The idea behind the proof-of-work done by Bitcoin (and its array of clones) is that the computational problem that miners try to solve and its solution depend on the transactions in the block (among other things). It is precisely this property that makes transactions included in mined blocks almost impossible to reverse, as different block-contents mean that the proof-of-work has to be redone.

Projects like BOINC deliver units of work to its users with specifics of what has to be computed. The computer then performs the calculations and returns them to BOINC. No matter exactly what is being calculated, it is predetermined by a centralized organization and not dependent on unpredictable data such as transactions.

The solution of a proof-of-work should be hard to find, but easy to verify. Each node that receives a block should be able to verify its correctness with relatively small effort. Hashing works well for this, because a verification of the hash takes only a single computation of the hash-function, which is very fast. A BOINC project could consist of running a relatively slow simulation of a, say, a molecule, rather than a brute-forcing calculation like hash-function proof-of-work. This means that if a BOINC-related computation would be used as proof-of-work, the solution may not be quickly verifiable by other nodes, which would make block propagation very slow.

Finally, the difficulty of the computation needs to be adjustable based on network hashrate. With hashing, the approach is obvious, but how do you apply variable difficulty to an arbitrary computation?

GridCoin is hailed as a "useful" coin because it's coupled with BOINC. Sadly, the integration isn't as advanced as one might think. GridCoin is, in essence, just another Scrypt-coin that uses the regular proof-of-work hashing to secure its blockchain. What makes it different is that the block reward is higher if BOINC is running during the mining process. This doesn't make GridCoin much better than mining any other Scrypt-coin and leaving BOINC running. Scrypt-mining uses the GPU, leaving the CPU free for BOINC computations. If you mine GridCoin for maximum profits, you use both your GPU and CPU.

Typical distributed computing projects require a central organization to collect and verify contributions to prevent cheating. It's possible for such an organization to reward its users with some form of crypto-currency, but this currency would still need it's own miners to secure its blockchain. There may be a way to seemlessly integrate useful computations into a proof-of-work scheme, but as I said at the start of this post: It's far from trivial.

I started using the world community grid several days ago, but do not understand the relationship between Points and/or Results relates to Gridcoins earned. Looking at my statistics I see I have 13,000 points generated and 13 points, can someone help me understand? thanks

Yup, seems to fluctuate between ~100k and ~200k (cgminer difficulty), there's someone out there with a lot of hashing power who is making a lot of coin by running the difficulty up and down, hopping on and off the chain and jumping back in when the difficulty is low and riding the diff back up before he hops off again...

Another suggestion,
I think we need to support CPU mining sooner than later.
This way we can attract more native BOINC users to join the Gridcoin team.
Not sure how we ensure they are in Gridcoin team before we can account the BOINC credits for POW work.

Are any exchanges trading Gridcoin?