Most of the crypto world is keeping a close eye on the skyrocketing price of Bitcoin as it continues its trip to the moon. In fact, it is difficult to browse Steemit at the moment without seeing something of the form:
"BTC ... USD$4000 ... Bullish!!!"
However, I believe this is a perfect time to move my attention to the altcoins. Most altcoins have seen rapid drops in price, as a direct result of investors moving their investment from the altcoins into the core coins BTC and ETH. This has left the altcoins significantly undervalued.
I especially like the positioning of Gridcoin right now. Gridcoin rewards scientific compute carried out on the BOINC platform as its primary 'mining' mechanic, whilst also awarding 1.5% annual POS to its holders. As a PhD student myself, I am very excited by the potential in pointing crypto mining compute towards real world scientific applications - especially so as I can purchase cheap compute through the Gridcoin network with GRC. However, there are many other reasons I see Gridcoin as a great investment:
GRC is currently incredibly cheap, sitting at about 25% of its all time high and running up only 800 satoshi per coin. I would wager that GRC will double in price long before we live to see USD$8000 Bitcoin.
The growth potential of the coin is massive. It is the only coin to allow anyone to buy distributed compute power right now. Meanwhile, competitors like the GNT token are still fluffing around with a CPU only beta test. GRC is the only competitor in the distributed compute field built on a proven framework, BOINC, which has enjoyed almost two decades of development.
GRC runs on its own blockchain, meaning there is no need to worry about the impending US legislation regarding Ethereum tokens.
There is a significant update coming to the Gridcoin client to permanently address previous scaling issues by the unexpected explosive growth witnessed by the network in the past few months.
Even thought the compute involved in the 'mining' of GRC has doubled in the last 2 months, it is still significantly easier to mine than most other coins. As a result, I currently have a cluster outputting nearly 200 TFLOPS running BOINC to mine GRC.
If you would like to get started mining Gridcoin yourself by contributing to research, you can do so by installing BOINC and the Gridcoin Wallet. I have authored a guide in the past that walks you through the entire process from a cold start, The Total and Utter Noobie Guide to Successfully Solo Mining the Cryptocurrency Gridcoin.
If you would like to simply invest in Gridcoin, you will find it on most major exchanges including Polonies, Bittrex and the DEX.
Content credit:
Header, @joshoeah
Footer, @me-shell