Sure that is very true I agree with every line you wrote here. This is why we can buy bitcoin and altcoins so cheap right now, couse we spend our time for something we are not so sure that will succeed in the future. We risk our own money and spend our time (a long time in my case) in this crypto wild west world. We are like adventurers that sailed on a desert island couse we found a treasure map that led us there.
So we are in a harsh and wild environment, so someones could be harmed badly during the wade through the thicket etc etc. I also experienced that (I was robbed from some my coins that were worth lots of money here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/i-was-robbed-from-my-alt-coins-wallets-extremely-important-be-cautious-349072). And our price for wiping trails if we succeed with pushing this cryptovision into the mainstream will be the fact that we will have many coins that others curious and eager will want to possess.
I'm sure that killer apps will be created and believe that it will start this year. Why? More and more serious companies and organizations are interested in cryptocurrencies and they want a piece of that cake for themselves. They have money, they have people underneath so might create really great tools that can move crypto usability and popularity to the next level. More and more projects are rising around. The crypto island starts to appear on the horizon.
I think that Gridcoin will be one of this alt-treasure
I think Gridcoin has some unique challenges. I tried to mine it some time ago (over a month ago), and I never got it to work right. There are constant updates which shows how attentive the dev is but it also shows there is a lot of firefighting going on. I see the frustration in their forums about it even today. Constant updates, constant forks, constant sync issues, etc. I personally don't have the time to pursue it with my nine computers. And yes I'm aware that the latest version of the GridCoin client has an auto-update feature that should help.
I believe CureCoin will be much easier to setup and use. At least I hope so. The methods these two dev teams have taken to achieve a similar goal is quite different. I believe CureCoins approach will be much simpler to maintain with the obvious caveat that it is going to be centrally managed. However, GridCoin is also centrally managed in a less direct way (one pool, one developer) so I don't see it being really any different in the end.
I hope both of the coins succeed but I can say the coin that is easiest to setup and use will have quite an advantage over the other. Think of non-computer people trying to setup GridCoin. It just isn't going to happen. I've been working with computers daily for over 30 years and I found the GridCoin installation to be incredibly frustrating. Now I've seen there is some collaboration with the BOINC developers as well and a new client (integrated miner) is in the works that should make things much easier. That is definitely needed!
I can't say what it is going to be like folding for CureCoins since I have not done it yet but based on the latest information I've seen I believe we simply fold with the F@H client or a simpler F@H version being developed by the Curecoin dev's. Then based on the amount of work submitted to F@H, we receive a payout once per day based on the amount of work we have submitted compared to all others doing the same thing. It will be a proportional payout. The concept seems pretty simple. The execution is what will count.
The miners are a different element completely since mining will be ASIC friendly and CureCoin is based on the SHA-256 algorithm. The last value I've seen is folding gets 80% of the coin distribution and mining gets 20%.
If things are different than what I recall hopefully the CureCoin dev's can point out where CureCoin currently stands.
The CureCoin approach makes things like the hack that impacted GridCoin recently simply not possible.
Edited: Fixed a couple of typo's.