bitcoin was a proof of concept for the distributed ledger. Since all money is just a unit of account the distributed ledger could keep track of things it was setup to show effort was done in the form of computer processing. Keep in mind its effort for efforts sake. So basically its like having a token that says you burned a barrel of oil. The creator I assume did not like the way inflation brought down the value of money so he programatically made the money (tokens) value inflate by progressively having the wasted effort increase. A token eventually require two barrels of oil burned, then four, etc. This unfortunately created a kind of frankenstein monster that is kinda useless for day to day payments but when it got on the radar of investment types caused it to be inflated through the roof from speculation. Other tokens worked to solve many of these issues but generally there has not been much interest in crypto that makes sense for day to day exchange like gridcoin. The reason is because those use the effort to create value and that is no way to get rich.