Gridcoin is a cryptocurrency that rewards users for running the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). With BOINC you are not burning electricity in order to find a fitting nonce for a hash, you are actually contributing to scientific research.
To get started I recommend using this guide by 
In my first Guide I described all the little steps involved in setting up BOINC on an Odroid XU4. It's finally running stable, so in Part 2 we can now look at performance and profitability.
In part 1 I was using Ubuntu 16.04 minimal. Unfortunately I ran into some problems with it when it comes to stability. From time to time the whole device stopped working and every command I threw at it responded with an “input/output error” indicating a corrupted SD-Card. I formatted the SD-Card and installed everything from scratch, but the problem reaccured. I bought a new SD-Card and when it was running stable for a few days I published my first guide. A few days later I was back to the “input/output errors”. I knew that it was running smoothly for other users, but that was the point in time where I just wanted to set it on fire or to start something different from scratch.
I heard that some other users had stable configurations on Arch Linux, so I wanted to give it a try as well. If you have heard about Arch you probably know, that it can be a pain to set everything up. Luckyly Tholo pointed me to an installation script that helped a lot!
The github page has some nice documentation about how to prepare everything. A little something I would like to add:
A lot of people were interested in the actual Magnitude this thing could achieve. Now that we are stable, I can give you some numbers. Remember that MAG and RAC will vary in the future and if you are running other projects. There numbers are from running Universe@Home only.
RAC: 11000
MAG: 9.73
With the current Mag_Unit of 0.2 this gives us 1.946 GRC/Day.
Let's take a look at the current prize levels.
GRC price: 0.00000902 BTC
BTC price: 3745$ / 3131€
Earnings $: 1.946 * 0.00000902 * 3745 = 0.0657$
Earnings €: 1.946 * 0.00000902 * 3131 = 0.0549€
Power consumption full load: 13.5W (0.0135kWh)
Price kWh: 24.61 Cent/kWh (Germany)
Cost €: 0.0135 * 24 * 0.2461 = 0.0797€
Profit €: 0.0549€ – 0.0797€ = -0.0248€
As you can see the Odroid is currently not able to fully cover its costs in Germany. But all of these values are constantly changing. Competition, project selection, Mag-Boost, Mag_Unit, Electricity-Price, GRC-Price and BTC-Price are all having an effect on this calculation. Let's see at what electricity-price the whole thing would be profitabe: 0.0549 / (0.0135*24) = 0.1694€ or 0.2027$
Which means if your price per kWh is below 0.1694€ or 0.2027$ you would currently be making profit (ROI not calculated in).
You can look at it from a lot of different perspectives. You could say that it's just not profitable and drop it. You could also crunch like a mad man and hope for huge profits when GRC price climbs back to previous levels. Or you could just see all of it as a great technological adventure with the outcome of actually contributing to science for just 2.48 Cents a day. :)
Happy crunching!
