Welcome to all new users of Gridoin Research!
There has been many new users and projects like SR-Base has grown almost by the double users and three times the hosts in just 60 days!
The Team Gridcoin community on BOINC is now up to 4559 active users, 2820 whom still needs to send their advertising beacon to the network to claim potential rewards.
Some wallet security tips to think on
With so many new users there are a few things that people may miss when they are setting things up. You can always visit experienced people on our Slack Channel or join the Bi-Weekly Mumble Hangouts that 
Once you are settled and got BOINC and the Gridcoin Research wallet to community properly there are a few things to remember when it comes to the security of your new wallet.
Keep an updated copy of your wallet.dat
Your assets are stored on the blockchain, but it's only with your wallet.dat file you can prove your ownership of them. It's VERY IMPORTANT to understand that whenever you create a new address the wallet.dat backup needs to be updated. The reason for this is that the wallet.dat file only contains the addresses that the wallet knows about at that given point.
If you have two computers that you use your wallet with, and one computer makes a new address to receive funds with, the other computer will not see those because it doesn't know about the new address.
The wallet automatically copies the wallet.dat file to a backup directory, but in case of a computer crash it's vital to have a backup, and this needs to be updated once in a while.
If you receive a larger amount of GRC it's recommended to update the backup copy of the wallet.dat file. Otherwise it's advisable to do this at least once a month.
Encrypt your wallet.dat
Since we are going to store a wallet.dat file on a place of the computer we also need to make sure it's secure. It is very recommended to use a password to protect the assets. This you do by setting a password on the wallet.dat file, which you do inside the wallet.
Once started you select "Settings -> Encrypt wallet" and chose a unique, long and memorable password. I recommend something that you can remember, a combinations of names or the order of town names you've lived in for example. Preferable it shouldn't be stored anywhere and should be easy for you to remember.
When you start the wallet next time you will need to Unlock the wallet in order to use the wallet.dat file. In case you don't want to transfer any funds but just let the wallet collect interest or research reward you can use the option to Unlock only for staking.
As a Researcher; Keeping a copy of the configuration file
As a researcher it's vital to keep a copy of the gridcoinresearch.conf file. This is because this file contains your public and private keys for your Research Beacon. The beacon is advertised on the network to let everyone know that your CPID should be included in the rewards calculation. Without your private key the wallet can't claim these credits, so it's vital to keep a copy of it.
This only needs to be backed up once the wallet sends out the beacon, something that is done about every 5-6 months.
You can find out when this was last done by going to https://gridcoinstats.eu/cpid/your-cpid and look under "User Details" and the first row that sais something like Beacon Status: advertised about 3 months ago.
Automatically unlock your wallet for staking
As it's recommended to keep your wallet.dat encrypted you will have to unlock the wallet for staking. This can be something that is easy to forget if your wallet is automatically launched when you log in to your system or if you have it on a Linux system that you occasionally log on to. There is one easy thing that you can do to solve this.
In your wallet, go to
- "Help -> Debug" and click on the "Console" tab.
- Type in
execute encrypt YourPassPhrase. - Type in the string in your gridcoinresearch.conf as
autounlock=YourPassPhraseAsEncryptedString
This will ONLY make your wallet able to stake. It will not unlock the wallet for transferring funds or do any other fund related commands like voting. The encrypted password string is unique to the current computer configuration and will not work if you move your configuration file to another system.
What is Gridcoin Research?
Gridcoin is a cryptocurrency which securely rewards BOINC computation on top of proof of stake.
What's BOINC? BOINCis an open-source volunteer distributed computing platform which utilizes the spare computer resources on 500k+ computers to attempt to cure diseases, map the milkyway, search for extraterrestrial life, and any other kind of distributable computation.
Anyone who needs a serious amount of distributed computing power (100k+ CPUs) almost entirely for free can create a BOINC project to create a distributed cloud service of their own desire (fairly easily) whilst the Gridcoin network potentially rewards your project's volunteers on your behalf.
Take a moment and listen to Gridcoin (2017/07/21) - Beyond Bitcoin Radioshow [Raw recording for impatients]
Joining Is Easy
By downloading and installing BOINC and the Gridcoin Research Wallet you can start directly. If you wish to not invest any starting capital, which you need to be able to stake regularly to earn rewards (10 000 GRC+ is recommended) you can join the GRCpool.
Gridcoin Pool Mining 101 - Start Here!
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