I hope many here already know about or support BOINC, it's a grid computing platform that allows to distribute scienific simulation tasks to personal computers. These tasks are for exmaple about folding proteins (https://boinc.bakerlab.org/), help defeat cancer (https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/hdc/overview.do), help defeat Ebola (https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/oet1/overview.do) and so much more.
You just let the BOINC manager run in the background of your PC and it will run tasks from different projects. You can adjust how much percentage it uses of your CPU/GPU so that it does not slow you down when you work on your computer.
What is relatively new in addition to BOINC is Gridcoin, a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, that gets created by doing these tasks (The more computing power you give to BOINC the higher the percentage of coins you will earn, total inflation is always the same). The whole things is rather complicated, if you heard of cryptocurrencies before: It's based on Proof of Stake, only the amount of coins you earn depends on your percentage of research done to toal research, which is stored in a decentralized way in the blockchain. Hower, more simply put: The more you research the more coins you earn and coins are only created by research.
Fore mroe info: https://www.reddit.com/r/gridcoin and gridcoin.us
So when you have some spare computing power please join BOINC and if you are interested also Gridcoin. You will likely not earn more than you spend on electricity but the really great thing about is supporting science!
