YSK: You can earn crypto donating your computer's spare computational power to science. Feel good and stack coins at the same time.

Who says proof of work has to be a bunch of otherwise meaningless hashes? Maybe we could put all that computer power to good use?

Folding @ home and BOINC are two platforms for volunteer computing which are incentivized by cryptocurrencies. Folding@home works on protein folding (which is relevant to many areas of medical/biological research) and BOINC is a platform with 15+ projects in areas from protein folding to finding black holes and drug discovery.

You don't need to be a computer expert to earn coins doing this, in fact I'd say it's way simpler (and more rewarding!) than traditional mining.

Folding @ home is rewarded by Banano, Gridcoin, Dogecoin, and Curecoin. Gridcoin can be earned at the same time as Curecoin which is nice.

BOINC is rewarded by Gridcoin, they reward about a dozen of the available BOINC projects. If you're interested in learning more about BOINC, check out /r/BOINC4Science. BOINC has more CPU-only projects so you can make the most efficient use of your hardware (no need to compete with other users who have GPUs/graphics cards).

Both of these programs can be configured to run only while your computer is not in use so they don't slow anything down. Or you can run them while it's in use, just give them a little less resources than normal to keep things running smoothly.

It's a fun way to give back and stack some coins, I've been doing this for years and it's nice knowing that I helped scientists working on new cancer treatments.

PS If you're interested in learning more about how crypto can help science, /r/cryptoforscience is the sub for you. It's a coin-neutral space to hear the latest from the DeSci movement.