Protein folding and grid computing networks are based on altruism and enthusiast novelty interest “wow I can use my spare computational power on this global network of other enthusiasts to cure cancer”, you know, novel in 2004.
As soon as some enthusiasts introduced cryptocurrency to these networks, see Curecoin and Gridcoin, users of those quickly became the most significant contributors to those networks (until those particular crypto currencies’ economic models fell apart). It wasn’t “spare computational resources” it was capital investment for a yield in those digital assets. I believe there are communities still experimenting with this regarding protein folding and looking for mutations iteratively.
So a profit motive will always beat out a non-market based approach, which isn’t really news
Call me a dreamer, but I wonder if that would remain true in a UBI-style environment?