It is timeeven better time to start with Gridcoin now. The new wallet version 5.1 is recently released and available for download from here:
The wallet with private keys is unfortunately available only for a PC but not for a mobile phone.
Mobile wallets without private keys are available with Holytransaction and Microgrid. Both are offering passive income either as automated staking or a daily interest.
Holytransaction wallet looks very user friendly and offers several staking options. It can be tested for free with the following faucets:
https://gridcoin.ch/faucet(for GRC)
https://pipeflare.io/r/pf3 (to deposit and exchange ZEC and DOGE to other passive income coins PIVX, BC etc)
Here is my November update:
Since the last month update, 5000 GRC coins for Solo mining are collected via different sources. My GrcPool performance was finally great due to computing for Amicable numbers project. The GRC earnings jumped from 20 GRC in October to 248+ coins as of now.
This is how magnitude reacted on NVIDIA GPU before and after I switched from the GrcPool to the Solo mining.
And that was an earning curve:
The conclusion that I can make is that GrcPool works very good. If is only a question to select projects with higher magnitude. The only difference seems that if any scientific discovery is made, it can not be associated with an individual contributor. Mining solo would record an individual contribution to the discovery of an Amicable pair of a pulsar.
Gridcoin wallet installation was not very straight forward but was successful after some ups and downs.
2 tips from my experience:
1) backup your wallet. File 'wallet.dat' and conf files should be stored in secure place. There is also an option to o encrypt the wallet. https://gridcoin.us/guides/security.htm
2 ) blockchain may require long time to synchronize first time. Do not break the process and there is an option to copy blockchain files manually first. https://gridcoin.us/guides/acquire-grc.htm
Conclusion: Gridcoin wallet installation is not difficult but if is always possible to compute with BOINC either without any Gridcoin at all of with a GrcPool. It maybe possible that things get better in the future.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=edu.berkeley.boinc
It is not expensive to aquire some GRC on exchange (amount that can be considered as donation to gridcoin development) and leave them for a passive income with no private keys wallets.
I hope Gridcoin and distributed computing for science will be developing in the near future. Good mobile wallet and GRC rewards from BOINC client directly will be a good improvement.
...and you will also help the author collect more tips.