Why BOINC Will Never Run Out of Projects for Gridcoin to Work on

I’ve seen a few posts recently looking into strengths and weaknesses of Gridcoin. One issue brought up was the dependence on BOINC (which Gridcoin doesn’t control) for computational material.

Here are a few reasons that isn’t a big deal and why BOINC will not be running out of projects that need crunching anytime soon:

1. As more computational power comes online and more success stories pile up, more researchers will hear about BOINC and design projects for it.

2. Existing projects could be scaled up, WAY UP, and some already hope to be.

3. Gridcoin could make its own BOINC projects.

4. Gridcoin can function without BOINC projects.

(1) World Community Grid reaches out to scientists and encourages them to come up with projects. They even give out grants to help. They just did this for projects focused on Climate Change.
As mentioned in some of my other posts, BOINC has contributed to lots of journal articles and research publications. As more researchers hear about BOINC and its successes, more will want to get projects going.

(2) Existing projects, could scale up, and several have!

SETI@home has been around for well over a decade. Since they started they’ve collected new data and reprocessed older data in new ways. Right now only a small fraction of the sky is being recorded and at a fraction of available wavelengths.

The Clean Energy Project, which I’ve mentioned before, has goals of scaling up by many (MANY) orders of magnitude. They’ll have work even when we all have quantum computers in our phones! So far, a couple million molecules have been modeled for one or two characteristics or uses. The project's creator told me “My research group has huge hopes of understanding the entire molecular space, which is composed of 10^60 to 10^180 synthesizable molecules”.

Scientific models can usually be run at a better resolution (spatial, temporal, etc) to achieve (hopefully) greater accuracy. These improvements in spatial or temporal resolution dramatically increase computational needs.

The search for ever larger prime numbers (and making sure none are missed) is very computationally intensive. A project already exists doing this and it may never end! (Thanks Hive account@dutch for the comments!)

(3) Gridcoin/Gridcoin users could even make BOINC projects. I know there are scientists (I am one) and lots of smart creative people who are involved in Gridcoin. If projects are ever in short supply (which I doubt will happen for the reasons listed above) then surely some passionate research-minded Gridcoiners will come up with some great ideas to put our computers to use. As mentioned by a commenter, there has already been at least one Gridcoin project on BOINC.

(4) Gridcoin doesn't need BOINC to function. I added this after getting some great feedback in the comments, so see Hive account@vortac's comment below for details. Basically Gridcoin could revert to using Proof-of-Stake only.