A very well-written and thoughtful post. (How dare you?! j/k)

I have had all of those same thoughts, and no great answers. On the other hand, the entire crypto space has the same problem. Except for a few rare exceptions, there's nothing I can really do with Bitcoins at the moment. And yet it's closing in on $4000/coin. Does this make sense? No. Does it need to? Apparently not.

People are throwing their money into ICOs like madmen these days. Everyone is trying to get rich quick. Gridcoin, at its heart, seems to be an altruistic endeavor. And altruism doesn't really make one wealthy, so the coin languishes where it's at.

Personally, I want it to be worth at least enough to cover the cost of my electricity use, which is a non-trivial amount. But I honestly don't know how or if that's gonna happen.

Using my rig, I could be mining lots of other PoW altcoins, and making some amount of profit, even after electricity costs. But I just can't bring myself to do it. Sitting there grinding out meaningless hashes, 99.99% of which will be thrown away? No thanks. I'd rather fold proteins to help cure Alzheimer's, or find prime numbers which will help some future scientist/mathematician make some new discovery.

There are 3 "science" coins I know about at the moment; Gridcoin, FoldingCoin, and CureCoin. None of them are doing particularly well as a "coin", meaning as a store of value. What would be great is if somehow the scientific community themselves made these coins valuable, through suggestions like your own, paying for projects. Because then the rest of the world would say "Hey, those coins are worth something, so I'm gonna throw some mining hardware at a science project and get some!" And the coin, in a way, would end up "tricking" people into doing the right thing. They get money, science gets done. Win-win.