Seti

In early days of the public/mainstream Internet, the mid 90s, Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) was launched as for as far as I know, the first real distributed computing service. With a small software program running on your computer/PC, it would start computing whenever the screensaver kicked in. Seti required a enormous amount of computing power, since the goal of the Seti project was to identify extraterrestrial life by finding anomalies in all of the raw data recorded of the universe by big antennas around the world. Such anomalies were then further studied.

Supercomputers could do the task, but that would have required a big setup of many supercomputers and would have costed a whole lot of money! Keep in mind, a super computer in those times could easily cost 1-5M US$ a piece.

The Seti team came up with the concept of distributed computing, using the processors of the increasing number of PCs owned by employees and private persons at home. The resources available around the world was such an amount of factors high then the Seti team ever dreamed of before rolling out this network.

I loved the invention of Seti and contributed for at least 2 years to the project; Until my PC became really slow in comparison to other installation and degraded my contribution to almost nothing. Many engineers managing large server installation started to use their environment to contribute to Seti. These server farms would handle by far the largest load, and I lost interest since I did not see results anymore in my stats files.

Gridcoin - Distribute Computation Network

Recently I discovered Gridcoin, and they are doing exactly what Seti started back in the days; However slightly different: While Seti was a single service with a distributed computation method build into, Gridcoin offers the framework/network to run ANY service in a very similar distributed method to Seti. In addition, with Gridcoin anybody who provides their idle CPU/GPU (or processing power of any other processor) to the network, can earn money! Something that was not implemented with Seti.

The Future

With the enormous amount of processing power around the world today, of which a lot sits idle, Gridcoin may be a crypto based network/service that can become a huge success! At least it is a service to follow closely!

Trading / Investing

Less then two days ago, Gridcoin was discovered on the exchanges, meaning, value of the Gridcoin is going up and up. It may include some pump and dumps, but I' do believe int he service they offer and therefore Gridcoin is well positioned to have more pumps then dumps.

This is what Gridcoin writes on its own webiste (http://www.gridcoin.us/)

Gridcoin (Ticker: GRC) is a decentralized, open source math-based digital asset (cryptocurrency). It performs transactions peer-to-peer cryptographically without the need for a central issuing authority.

Gridcoin was the first block chain protocol that delivered a working algorithm that equally rewards and cryptographically proves solving BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) hosted work, which can be virtually any kind of distributed computing process (GPU/CPU/Sensor/Etc).

BOINC is an open-source volunteer oriented computing grid that combines the processing power of all individual users for the purposes of scientific research. It's free, and harnesses the unused clock cycles from processors and graphics cards to attempt to cure cancer/aids/ebola/malaria, map the milkyway, crack enigma codes, etc..

Gridcoin rewards BOINC computation using the Distributed Proof of Research (DPOR) reward mechanism, which is a combination of Proof of BOINC (POB) and Proof of Stake (POSv2).

Proof of Work (POW) consensus mechanisms are not utilised by the Gridcoin network, making the Gridcoin cryptocurrency network far more energy efficient than any existing POW cryptocurrencies.

ENJOY

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