Hello World!
To me: I am a graduate student, M.Sc. Energy and Environmental Engineering of the TUHH (Hamburg University of Technology)
The Start
I was once talking to a friend about how much hardware everybody has idleing around, doing nothing but catching dust like old laptops, phones or desktops. In worst case, this hardware is running and doing nothing but burning electricity. I am not sure whether we directly mentioned BOINC (the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), but we were certain we had to use this hardware, all this calculation power for something good. Cancer research, SETI, climate prediction, something had to be possible.
A day later I googled and found BOINC. I downloaded the client and saw that I can support CERN with their particle research at LHC. I was kind of happy. I always wanted to do something about particle physics to end up somewhere in nuclear fusion (for example in Cadarache at ITER or in Greifswald at Wendelstein 7-x) but I doubt that with my masters degree of Energy- and Environmental Engineering will get me to all that plasma-physic-brains who are working there. Probably they would just make fun of me when I get there and tell them "Hey, I know what a steam turbine does"
Anyway, I proudly started helping them.
The Downfall
It was just one day later I guess. I had my desktop and my laptop(s) and my phone(s) and my RaspberryPi working in BOINC through the night. It was October 2014 so it's usually pretty cold in Hamburg, Germany in this time. I got up, preparing for university. When opening the door of my room, it was, for my feeling, freezing in the flat. My room certainly had 5 degrees more than the rest of the flat. Of course, I had about 1 kW of electricity running through my devices all night. Long story short: I worried about my electricity costs. In Germany 1 kWh costs about 0.3 Euro or 0.35 USD. I calculated a bit and nearly unplugged everything immediately. Haha 2500 Euro electricity costs in a year. No thanks, I am still a student. Well what I did is optimizing research, disabling my GPU (nearly 250 W less), putting my old laptops in the students council room where I do not have to pay electricity (shame on me, I know, but another 300W less). And of couse I put the temperature control in my flat a bit down, so I heated it mainly by my desktop plus laptop and not by gas. What could I do more about those costs?
The Saviour - Gridcoin
What I did was googleing "payment for research boinc". I still know it. I read Gridcoin. I googled "Gridcoin forschen" (meaning Gridcoin researching in German) and found this article by Christoph Bergmann:
http://bitcoinblog.de/2014/10/20/der-gridcoin-die-kryptowahrung-fur-die-wissenschaft-wird-ein-jahr-alt-und-erfindet-sich-neu/ ... This article is about Gridcoin and how it could pay you for research activity in BOINC. Well my friends who I sent the link to started to make fun of me because the first thing they read was "Gridcoin has massive syncing problems" (This is not the case anymore by the way.).
But I was really interested in earning a crypto-currency for research. Crypto-currency was something new to me, Ive never heard of Bitcoin before but I did not care, I wanted to join Gridcoin community. I asked many stupid questions and I was proud when on or two of those questions were answered by the developer himself, Rob Halförd. I had contact to the man whos idea I was falling in love with! Okay, at that time Gridcoin had many problems. The old currency Gridcoin Classic was about to stop being developed in favor of Gridcoin Research which is just Gridcoin nowadays (introducing 98% effectivity to research instead of 50% in Gridcoin Classic). There actually were massive syncing problems and forking and whatever you can imagine a newbie would instantly run away from. But I kept updating, I kept asking stupid questions as those questions were definetely out of my league (remember, never heard of Bitcoin or any other crypto-currency or a "fork", nearly no idea of programming). Around Christmas I made myself a gift. I bought the first Bitcoin to buy me my first Gridcoin as a long term investment.
I was (and I still am) certain that Gridcoin, as the one and only coin which supports research activity on a broad variety of projects, can reach the top 5 in the coinmarketcap or even beat Bitcoin because EVERY coin out there is just wasting energy (except those coins that are working with research like Curecoin BUT do not support more than one or two projects).
Status Quo
I now see myself as an active member of the Gridcoin community. I am still mining/researching actively. I own a certain amount of GRC and I also convinced friends and family to invest a bit, too. I still am a clueless when it comes to codeing/cryptography/even simple network stuff so I do not understand every word which is posted to the forum or IRC BUT I can help newbies who just want to start mining/researching. I was promoted to operator status in IRC (yey ^^) so maybe I can even say I became a respected member of the community. I try to help where I can.
Maybe the one who reads this gets an idea what it is like to feel doing the right thing. Even IF Gridcoin somehow fails, I certainly did something more than calculating hashes with my devices. I researched in international research projects which makes me just proud.
Quez
EDIT: Fixed Link
