There is also Proof of Stake to secure the network, which does not waste electricity as much and on top of that the amount of stake you get for each vote to secure the network could also be made dependent on the amount of work you do for a science project as measured by BOINC.
The identification of which user gets what amount of "Proof of research" bonus is done via hashed BOINC email, as the email in BOINC is private and cannot be accessed by others.
But this has two issues if i am reading this right:
1. Since only Gridcoin has the information of the users, than what is to prevent them from creating fake accounts that they themselves hold and paying themselves more Gridcoins?
2. Unless if every single donor has an encrypted Comodo (or something similar) email with Gridcoin, then emails can be stolen. And if gridcoin becomes valuable enough and emails are not encrypted, then its a sure thing that they will be stolen.
There is not "also Proof of Stake", because it's a flawed concept. What's at stake? Nothing. You can sell your coins before starting an attack, so you wouldn't be attacking yourself like you would with Bitcoin and proper mining. Might as well just use the USD or bottle caps as currency.
The identification of which user gets what amount of "Proof of research" bonus is done via hashed BOINC email, as the email in BOINC is private and cannot be accessed by others.
See my other post about gridcoin.