It's worth noting that one project only accounts for 1/19th of the current rewards for research and 0 of the rewards for staking. They do not have near complete

It's worth noting that one project only accounts for 1/19th of the current rewards for research and 0 of the rewards for staking. They do not have near complete control of the monetary supply. As well, as more projects are added to the whitelist that 1/19 fraction grows smaller Additionally if a project were to try to manipulate things, it's hard to do anything on a large scale without it being noticed. With it being noticed, a poll would almost certainly come up and get voted yes on to remove the project from the whitelist. In terms of those who gather stats from those projects, it requires at least 60% rounded up of the scrapers (who pull the stats) to exactly match. This is currently 4/6 although there will likely be more scrapers in the future. You'd have to collude with multiple people, and in a way that could also be easily detected from anyone cross comparing stats on BOINC and stats on Gridcoin. For the last part, yeah, it's for the science, and not for the money for me anyway. The Gridcoin I get for it is just a nice bonus