Research Coins

I have always wondered the enormous amount of computation power that's used in cryptocurrency mining : could it also be used for something else. the awesome ways in which people have got massive computational capabilities built using seemingly homegrown solutions or by putting together simpler machines always left me with awe.

So my search for what could be a better way of utilizing the computing power led me to various cryptocoins which are trying to focus in this specific area.

the most functional one I can see is Gridcoin(GRC). Gridcoin rewards people for using the computing power for BOINC or "Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing" projects. However not all projects in BOINC are considered for Gridcoin rewards. I will do a detailed post later to talk specifically about GRC, suffice to say they are my favourite at this point.

A new entry which is ridding on BOINC is SPARC, just like you can merge mine various cryptocoin you can effectively mergemine gridcoin with SPARC too. grcpool is by default doing exactly that and if you are mining on your own you can register your own CPID and claim SPARC's in bunch of 10 tokens minimum. As @trikkstar pointed out SPARC is not tradable at this point in time however as it doesn't require any special effort i would suggest to collect those tokens also just in case they do turn out to be of some value.

Others that are working but on a very focused area Folding@Home.

Two more Ethereum Smart Contracts working in research / good use of computation area are