I've been thinking about ways to make Gridcoin a little better known in the science community. One idea that came to my mind is the financial support of a research team through the Gridcoin community. For this I suggest to use the crowdfunding platform experiment.com
Collection of Funds
The basic idea is that pool users can automatically donate x % of their earnings to the Gridcoin Science Fund, similar to how they can already make donations to the pool today. I have discussed this with the pool admin and he would be willing to implement such a feature.
Additionally I will do a Steemit post from time to time and donate the earnings from this also to the Gridcoin science fund.
Duration of Fundraising
The suggestion is to collect funds during a period of six months for now. During these six months donations are collected by voluntary pool users. In addition, donations can be sent to a Science Fund address.
Estimated Value of the Raised Funds
At the moment the pool generates 7,885 Gridcoins per day. If about 1 % of this income is donated, this would give about 14,430 Gridcoins after 6 months. Hopefully some individual donations and the income from the Steemit posts will be added. All in all, the goal is to collect about 15,000 Gridcoins.
At today's price, this corresponds to around 540 dollars.
Project to Fund
Of course, the decision which project we support depends on the amount of Gridcoins we have collected. But even without knowing this, there are some criteria that a project must fulfil.
- The project must be led by a PhD student, an assistant professor or a professor from a prestigious university.
- The number of Gridcoins donated should not be too small in comparison to the project goal, so that we can also generate attention with the donation.
- The lead researcher needs at least one puplication with 10 or more citations.
Other decisions, such as the scientific discipline to which the project should belong (mathematics, biology, medicine, etc.), should be made by consensus (by vote).
Gridcoin <-> Fiat Conversion
Since the donations are received in the form of Gridcoin, but the projects do not accept donations in the form of cryptographic currencies, it is mandatory that the Gridcoins are sold. In order not to influence the price, a community internal sell is preferred. If no one is willing to buy the Gridcoins, they are sold at market prices on the usual exchanges. However, a sales order may never exceed 1% of Gridcoin's daily trading volume.