Alex de Vries just published a commentary in Joule on Bitcoin’s growing energy problem.
De Vries estimates that globally, computers mining Bitcoins crunch 26 quintillion hashes (that's 26 followed by 18 zeros: 26,000,000,000,000,000,000,) every second of every day. Bitcoin miners use at least 2.55 Gigawatts of power, and is predicted to use three times that by the end of this year. That's more than some countries (eg. Ireland, Austria, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands) use in a year.
The Estimated Number of Terahashes per Second (Trillions of Hashes per Second) Performed by the Bitcoin Network
Source: Blockchain.info.
Instead of wasting energy on useless hashes, Gridcoin rewards “miners” for using their computer power to help with scientific research on the BOINC platform. To get started with Gridcoin see the links below.
Some of the BOINC projects have led to scientific publications in prestigious journals like Cell, Science and Nature.
Join Gridcoin Research and BOINC and Change the World
BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, pronounced /bɔɪŋk/ – rhymes with "oink") is a distributed work platform that has been around since 2002 and rewards all participants with credits. BOINC consists of over 500,000+ active users and many more computers. BOINC holds the Guinness world record as the largest computing grid in the world. It is a popular platform for researchers to do large amounts of distributed work. The infrastructure is already in place, and no payment is required. Doing distributed work is purely voluntary, where users can attach any project of their choosing.

Gridcoin Research is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) cryptocurrency that rewards Proof-of-Research (PoR) for BOINC computation.
Gridcoin is an amazing project with an amazing community!
Website: https://gridcoin.us
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GridcoinNetwork
Discord: https://discord.me/gridcoin
Steemit: https://steemit.com/created/gridcoin
White Paper: https://gridcoin.us/assets/img/whitepaper.pdf
-- Github --
Codebase: https://github.com/gridcoin/Gridcoin-Research
Community: https://github.com/gridcoin-community
Many of the guides on the internet are compiled at one site and this can be helpful for new people:
https://www.whatisgridcoin.com/