GridCoin is a new peer-to-peer internet based cryptocurrency that aims to provide real benefits to humanity by compensating the coin miners for participating in BOINC projects that may 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 unecessary heat and wasted power for the proof of work algorithms required to keep the coin network running.
About the Berkeley Open Infrastructure Network Computing Grid: (BOINC)
Boinc is an opensource volunteer oriented computing grid that combines the processing power of all of the distributed PC's to concentrate on important projects.
Its free, and harnesses the unused clock cycles from PC and Video cards to aid in the research for the project goal.
Some of the major projects that you can participate in:
Cancer research to help find cures for cancer and schizophrenia
Rosetta@Home: 3 dimensional protien modeling, HIV, Cancer, Alzheimers
World community grid: Various projects including researching strains of rice for regions where hunger is a concern World Community Grid - Rice
Malaria control
Alzheimers and Mad cow research
DNA Sequencing, Microorganism identification, Bird flu research, protien docking algorithms, molecular biology, evolution research
Nanotechnology research to find new molecular materials
Large scale protien structure prediction, understanding diseases and pathologies
Quantum chemistry
Discovery of new drugs
Microgravity and microfluid research
Search for Neutron stars
Particle accelerator research
Cryptographic research
Search for extraterrestrials
Creating better weather models, predicting the weather
Mining Instructions:
Mining Instruction for Windows
Mining with GUIMiner (scrypt alpha) for Windows
Mining Reward
Miners are currently awarded with 5-150 new gridcoins per block, an amount which gets halved roughly every 4 years (every 840,000 blocks). The gridcoin network is therefore scheduled to produce approximately 168 million gridcoins (based on an average subsidy of 100grc), which is 8 times as many currency units as Bitcoin
Wallet Encryption
Wallet encryption allows you to secure your wallet, so that you can view transactions and your account balance, but are required to enter your password before spending gridcoins.
This provides protection from wallet-stealing viruses and trojans as well as a sanity check before sending payments.