RE: Gridcoin - How to Generate Value
Demand for Gridcoin can increase for three reasons:
BOINC altruistic - once we remove mandatory team requirement, plenty of BOINC users will join because they love BOINC and feel PoW is incredibly wasteful. Those users will enter crypto through Gridcoin, because they are already familiar with BOINC and they are likely to show their support by purchasing a small GRC stake.
Crypto altruistic - as people get richer and more familiar with crypto, some of them will dabble in Gridcoin, because it's so different and computing for science is engaging for many people (especially when you can afford it comfortably). Again, purchasing a small stake out of support or speculation or both.
BOINC commercial - an enterprising scientist might set up his own BOINC project(s), raining some GRC onto his crunchers to encourage participation. That would sit well with crypto investors who usually like such commercial applications (or mere notion of it, look at Golem).
I was thinking more of long term stability.
In the short term we can indeed create demand through adding more users, but the worldwide pool of crunchers is limited, especially altruistic crunchers. The question in the short term is, "Can we take on more users faster than we create the initial GRC that they require?
If yes, value will go up.
If no, value will go down.
Your third point is along the lines of my thinking and yes, Project rain could be a tool that is used. For a commercial entity however I would think an "x GRC per y Project Credit" rain would be more popular as that way they can reward those that do more work with more rewards.
If we keep the base minting the same, a commercial project could set-up and promise an x GRC per credit rain per month for all crunchers as an incentive.
As a side affect any "Gridcoin" devs could earn a side income through either assisting, consulting or hosting Boinc projects. Hey, we could have a Gridcoin project that hosts the commercial applications.
I agree that these 3 items could be drivers to increase the value of GRC. For the first item I only see this as a temporary value increase.
We currently have 35.000 active team members not part of Gridcoin. In case each new Gridcoin miner would buy on average $15 (500 GRC) to hold and stake, this would represent 17.500.000 GRC (= 4.5% of the circulating supply).
Initially this would create a shortage but once everybody has bought some coins the market will settle again, with current miners having to compete with 10x more new miners who will basically continue to BOINC as before but can make some extra money. Ultimately this may increase the suppy of GRC to the market resulting in downward pressures.
I wonder how many dedicated BOINC team members will also become dedicated GRC miners. It is my view that people who consciously take the decision to join the Gridcoin team are more likely to be more dedicated GRC miners as well. Consider this for example with the SPARC coin. Next to Gridcoin, I'm now mining SPARCs as well with zero dedication or effort. If I could extract some value out of this coin I would be pleased but if not I don't mind.
We have half a million active BOINC users and 4.3 million registered. And those are users who are running BOINC completely for free, paying for electricity and hardware out of their own pockets. Those numbers will likely increase even more, with Gridcoin covering most of the costs (or even yielding some profits). Of course, markets always settle in the end, but with millions of BOINC users available for recruiting, I wouldn't worry about it yet.
According to BOINC stats we have at this moment 175.000 active users. Of them around 35.000 are part of a team (not Gridcoin). When the mandatory team requirements disappear they can then start mining GRC without leaving their team. I don't really understand why we should consider 4.3 million registered users for BOINC altruistic specifically?
Number of active users is usually fluctuating between 200k and 500k. Will likely increase again as the winter arrives to Northern Hemisphere. For example, snapshot taken on March 25, 2017 shows 430.892 active users:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170325010254/http://boinc.berkeley.edu
Also worth mentioning, an active user is a user which has returned at least one result within the last 24 hours. However, many BOINC tasks take much longer than that, so it's a conservative number to begin with.
4.3 million users have shown enough interest in BOINC to install it on their machines, meaning they are considerably interested in computing for science. With a monetary incentive (Gridcoin), a significant part of them would probably become full users and are more likely to support a science-backed crypto, then a Proof-of-Work one.
Makes sense now, thanks for clarifying.