As you mentioned, this is a good thing. And as far as the effects on the currency go, this doesn't seem any different from Bitcoin miners moving from CPUs to GPUs to ASICs.
> If the currency became valueable, it is inevitable that someone would make solving this problem constant time.
Protein folding / structure prediction is NP-complete, so seems unlikely.
The optimization "problem" is a problem because it can wipe out the currency. The transition to better hardware was gradual, while a software optimization could literally make one persons CPU more efficient than the rest of the world combined.
>Protein folding / structure prediction is NP-complete, so seems unlikely.
While it may be difficult to actually fold the protein, folding the protein such that it breaks one of the assumptions I listed may be trivial.
If we could simply use NP-hard proven problems as hash functions, we would.
That being said, we are held accountable for our actions as many other altcoins are not, which is how they get away with scamming people.
Even if we do fail in the future, we have at least brought the idea of Folding to many miners who had never heard of it before. Look at our team, http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_summary.php?s=&t... but since we allow other team members to earn FLDC, we just hit 21 million FAH credits yesterday making us the 6th fastest FAH team in the program. That is an accomplishment in itself :)
"Mine Medicine, Not Hashes" implies that this is somehow useful for medicine. It really is just a pump and dump where a portion of the money goes to protein folding.
As for the IPO, we dont need one. Since a counterparty asset is very easy to create, our overhead is low. Thats why we are running a fundraiser, we plan on implementing additional features, but really no features are required to distribute FLDC. The features will help better the currency and the economy surrounding the currency, but unless people wish to give us money to do these things, then we will simply keep coding ourselves and distribute FLDC everyday.
Other blockchains require a lot of maintenance and patches, we do not. Almost no overhead
What else could you possible think I meant when I said the money goes towards protein folding?
>Other blockchains require a lot of maintenance and patches, we do not. Almost no overhead
You have the Bitcoin blockchain as overhead and you have the security of the Bitcoin blockchain, however you have created a speculative asset that is Bitcoin plus a mandatory tax for protein folding.
Are you sure about that? I am not sure that a protein structure can be checked in polynomial time, given there is no algorithm to check a protein structure besides manual labor.
D. E. Shaw already has a machine for it http://www.dfi.uchile.cl/~jsgonzal/aton.pdf
Here is how we invision the ANTON could become readily available for purchase:
There is no direct translation from one to another, but a common consensus is 1 hash equals 12,700 FLOPS when comparing the 2 side by side http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AFLOPS#Bitcoin_.22FLOPS.2... . The FAH grid computing network has 46 PetaFLOPS and is known as the world's most powerful computing network outside of the Bitcoin mining network.
Now at the time before ASICs and FPGAs started hitting the market in December 2012, the Hash rate of the BTC network was at 26 TeraHASH’s in mostly GPU and CPU power. Based on a rough comparison 12.7 PetaFLOP = 1 TeraHASH the potential computational power that could be added to FAH is
26 TeraHASH 12.7 PetaFLOPS = 330 PetaFLOPS.
Imagine if that power was harnessed for molecular protein folding. Most of this power was redirected to altcoin mining after the SHA ASICs came out, since there was no profit motive for folding. FoldingCoin looks to bring a profit motive for people to fold proteins by distributing FLDC along with other Counterparty tokens.
Venture capitalists could see this as an opportunity to invest in the creation of economic sized Anton Supercomputer, which is an ASIC molecular protein simulating machine that can fold more efficiently than standard computing hardware. This very thing happened to Bitcoin mining when it became exponentially profitable: venture capitalists invested in the creation of ASIC miners to compute SHA256 at a more efficient rate than standard computing hardware.
Each core is digitally signed for security reasons and authenticity of a real WU http://folding.stanford.edu/home/faq/#ntoc45
You give the same protein sequence to multiple miners, and the one with the minimum energy after time X wins the money. This will force the miners to find lowest energy solutions.
The way our coin helps is by convincing the mass amount of computational power that is dumped into altcoins that will eventually fade away, or become scam coins, to be better used towards something that will benefit the world.
The BTC miners i do not believe waste energy as they are providing a fantastic transaction ledger.
Counterparty is really innovative, and this is a great way to leverage it. Unfortunately, it's really easy to confuse with typical altcoins which really use miners.
This is great because it allows our development team to work on features, rather than a blockchain and wallet system that can be very hard for a small team of 5 to maintain. Please read this page if you havent already about the pros and cons of Counterparty http://foldingcoin.net/fldc-vs-alts/
The miners are there for a reason. Looking at the Counterparty protocol you will see that since the CP assets live inside the individual BTC transactions, that unless the miners verify the transaction to be accepted, then the assets will work in the same way that BTC does and not go through.
Realistically, what you have done here is made a centralized currency in which you issue new coins for yourself then we trust you donate the coins to protein folding.
We can already donate to protein folding with Bitcoin so I don't see much use in making an altcoin that does it in a less useful way.
As for why not just donate to standford? You absolutely could and i am sure they would love that :) But we are trying to harness the 330 PetaFLOPS of CPU and GPU computational power used in the other altcoins. So by giving an incentive to fold to the miners, the hopes are they will move over to folding, rather than hashing at blockchains that in many cases die off or get abandoned.
MD2 was designed by cryptographers and has tons of research regarding it's security. It is now broken.
Protein folding basically has no research regarding it's security as a hash function, because it isn't designed as a hash function.
Protein folding almost certainly has a large optimization problem, an attacker likely could find ways to increase his mining power by orders of magnitude. If the currency became valueable, it is inevitable that someone would make solving this problem constant time.
Now, is making protein folding more a efficient a good thing? Absolutely! But the only way it can be made more efficient is by making this currency useless.
Essentially, the only way this currency can be useful to DNA folding is if the currency becomes useless for securing money.
Edit: It appears that foldingcoin is on top of the bitcoin blockchain so miners aren't even there for consensus. They are simply creating a speculative asset that has an increasing monetary supply that equates to donations to protein folding. The miners are completely unnecessary for security.