In preparation for the writing of this Steemit article, I created a poll on the Gridcoin blockchain that technically runs a few more days, although I feel I have enough data at this point with 94 total voters to put this article out there.
Click here to see the current poll results.
I've been involved with Gridcoin for a couple months now with the first month mostly spent on the Gridcoin Subreddit answering questions from new GRC miners and investors, and the second month I began spending more time on the Slack channel in the hopes of contributing more to the Gridcoin project.
Up until I created my poll two weeks ago, I knew one fundamental truth: It is not a matter of IF the team requirement is lifted, but WHEN. I could point to countless Reddit posts where the concept is casually tossed around with phrases like "when the team requirement is lifted..." or "can't wait until the team requirement is lifted." Nevermind the word from long-time Gridcoin veterans stating regularly that the developers are actively working on lifting the team requirement, or that there's a sizable active developer bounty for removing the team requirement.
Can you start to figure out how a new user might assume there's no debate being had on the issue of removing the team requirement and that we're simply waiting on the development?
So as I was creating my poll, that's the lens I used. Not because I personally want the team requirement to be lifted (I do) but because I truly didn't realize there was a debate being had about it --- especially a debate on whether or not lifting the team requirement would inflate the price of GRC.
After nearly two weeks now of folks in the IRC and the Slack accusing me of malicious intent because I neglected to provide an option that allowed certain folks to strongly express their opposition to lifting the team requirement, I can finally say the timeline is winding down and the poll will be complete shortly and I have the data I was trying to get. As of right now, here are the poll results:
Purely based on the number of votes, we are split evenly between the two bookend options I provided. 28 people voted that they believe GRC is headed toward 10,000 Sats or greater, and 28 people voted that they believe lifting the team requirement will not have a material impact on the price of GRC. In discussions with some folks in the slack, there would have at least been some votes cast for an option of "Abstain" or "Lifting the team requirement will lower the price of GRC."
What would lifting the team requirement mean to a "mine and dumper?"
There are a number of miners of GRC who perform what I would call a "mine and dump" of GRC. They mine the coin every day, and once a month or so they sell their GRC on the exchanges. This type of miner is most-likely to oppose lifting the team requirement, I've learned. They don't hold a lot of GRC, so unless the price of GRC rises so high as to offset the impact of potentially thousands of new miners competing with them, lifting the team requirement could be considered a losing proposition.
Personally, I don't think lifting the team requirement has to be a negative for these folks, though. I have been a proponent of improving the DPoR reward system in conjunction with lifting the team requirement. This could allow for an automated smart-scaling of DPoR rewards, or potentially a manual (voted on with a Gridcoin blockchain poll) update to the daily DPoR rewards every quarter. If we did the latter, we could take a look at what the average miner earns in GRC and vote on an increase to help account for any inflation we're seeing in miners. I would argue lifting the team requirement and doubling or tripling the number of GRC miners would force us to act on this issue, and could be viewed as a positive thing by miners.
What will really happen to the price of GRC if the team requirement is lifted?
The common belief by people who want to see the team requirement lifted is that we would be unlocking the growth potential of Gridcoin mining, and since miners have various incentives to hold GRC (voting weight, frequency of staking, interest) we should see increased demand for GRC and thus increased price. I believe this is accurate, but I personally can't even begin to estimate what kind of impact that would be. My vote in the poll was 8,000 Sats or $0.24 USD. I don't know that I believe lifting the team requirement is going to make GRC a $1.00 USD coin, but I think the impact could be substantial.
What is the argument for why the price of GRC might be reduced if the team requirement is lifted?
Among all the people accusing me of mal-intent over the last couple weeks due to the positive nature of my poll, there was one Gridcoiner by the name of 
I thought that was a very intelligent point, and it is well-taken. My counter-argument.... really more of a counter-question was: for every 100 "mine and dump" type miners, how many "mine and HODL" type miners will we potentially add? How many people might we add (like myself) who will invest their own money into the coin? I don't have the answer to that question, of course, but I can say this: some of these BOINCers have a fair amount of disposable income and might be excited to invest in Gridcoin once they really learn what it is and learn more about it.
My primary contention with the team requirement issue is that it has shut us out of traditional marketing channels for BOINC users and so many of them just simply don't know what Gridcoin is. When I first started BOINC, crunching for SETI@Home I saw the Gridcoin team near 1st place, but I didn't see anybody in the message boards talking about it or endorsing it, so without even doing any research, I just assumed it was some way to earn cryptocurrency but it must not be worth doing since nobody is talking about it. It took me a couple months of people mentioning Gridcoin in the AMD Subreddit before I really gave it a hard look.
What I'm doing after the team requirement is lifted...
If you read my Advertising Gridcoin in the Post Team Requirement World post, you already know that I founded a fairly large SETI@Home team and I intend to use Gridcoin as a tool to help my team rise to the top of the BOINC ranks. This is really why I'm so confident in the prospect of lifting the team requirement. I believe team founders/admins are going to push GRC hard to their teams in order to get people who perhaps only crunch 50% of the time to instead crunch 100% of the time. I believe it will change the landscape of Gridcoin's relationship in BOINC culture and lead to new and exciting things.
My plea to people who harbor negative feelings about lifting the team requirement
SPEAK UP. Reply here, or write your own Steemit post. Perhaps the concerns you have can be addressed by people, or perhaps your concerns are completely (objectively) valid and something that we should consider as we move ever closer to making this happen. As I shared at the beginning of this post, new people coming into Gridcoin today are effectively led to believe that lifting the team requirement is a given. If you don't want that to be the narrative going forward, speak up and convince people why the team requirement shouldn't be lifted.
As 
Thanks kids, and keep crunchin'.