I started crunch BOINC in November 2014 after I was talking to a friend about the waste of hardware that was catching dust rather than do something useful. A day later I discovered the possibility to get paid for the contributions I do for BOINC:
If you are a member of the Gridcoin BOINC team, you can receive Gridcoin as a reward for your BOINC contribution. These coins are exchangeable for Bitcoin on several coin exchanges. The blockchain is secured by both Proof-of-Stake and Proof-of-Research algorithms rather than wasteful Proof-of-Work hashing like in Bitcoin.
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.
