If you have ever studied Gridcoin in more detail, you have surely noticed this large spike in Gridcoin price and trade volume which has occurred almost exactly one year ago:
Poloniex price chart. During this spike, Gridcoin price reached an all time high value of 0.00009299 BTC. Market cap reached $10M.
Number of Google searches per day for term 'Gridcoin'. Big spike during the same period.
This event is usually referred to as "the Reddit night" among the Gridcoin community.
So what happened? One of our members posted this nice Gridcoin infographic, titled "A currency minted by doing science" (imgur link) to the Futurology subreddit (which has over 10 million subscribers):
And then, in less than an hour, that post simply went viral, in a frenzy of upvotes and comments. It was an explosion - within 3 hours, it had over one million views and was featured on the front page of Reddit, attracting huge attention and a whirlwind of clicks. It was a perfect storm, pushing all the right 'futurology buttons': science, technology, cutting edge innovation, green eco-friendliness and, of course, money (who's immune to that). After all, no person who is even remotely interested in futurology (me included) can't help, but think: what if this Gridcoin had the market cap of Bitcoin? What could science accomplish then, in the near future? There is certainly a strong "The Singularity is Near" aspect to it, again something that any futurologist simply can't miss (or ignore).
Here is the whole thread (archived), it's an interesting read:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/4b4drk/a_currency_minted_by_doing_science
"A currency minted by doing science" thread today. 5117 upvotes, 857 comments - certainly one of the most important Gridcoin threads ever
But it was not to last. Next day (March 20), Reddit moderators simply removed the post from the front page (due to "numerous complaints", as they explained afterwards) and the whole thing quickly abated. But not before the news hit Poloniex and other crypto-exchanges, pushing the Gridcoin price to record highs.
Since then, Gridcoin has been under much closer attention of Reddit censors all across the board. Posts mentioning Gridcoin are now being promptly deleted (usually within few minutes) on almost every subreddit, except on crypto-related ones. We've even had content deleted from BOINC subreddit (yes, Gridcoin is rewarding BOINC computations, but apparently that's not good enough for moderator freaks there). So, nothing new in that sorry world of unrestricted censorship and centralized moderator powers. Futurology needn't bother with them any longer, that's for sure.
