Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later! With a large influx of new crunchers, Gridcoin team grew so powerful that the very term 'competition' is becoming a stretch. We now have 4.3 times bigger RAC than the second placed team at [email protected] Not only that - our RAC is so large, it equals the total RAC of all other Top10 teams combined:
Recent average credit (RAC) is the total amount of BOINC credits the team accumulates in one day. More computations = more credits = more RAC = more science.
Needless to say, our RAC is increasing all the time and dramatically so, while 'competition' is more or less where it was. Three and a half months ago, our RAC was only around 10 million:
This screenshot shows [email protected] team stats on March 14, 2017. Taken from The Internet Archive, direct link: https://web.archive.org/web/20161221221637/http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu:80/milkyway/top_teams.php
Only a month ago, I was the top [email protected] cruncher, but now I am completely overrun by the grcpool.com (a new, very popular and actively developed Gridcoin pool).
Large mag days are fading - to compete with the pool, one would need at least 18 HD7970 GPUs, running 24/7. Crunch some easy GRC while you still can :)
So, I guess we are now approaching the post-team BOINC era, where team competition will matter less and less, because Gridcoin will be undisputed no.1 (can't compete against crypto). I think that even the lifting of mandatory team membership won't change things much, most of the crunchers ...