>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.

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.

At this point I'd say, good riddance. We'd be out of no longer neccessary cryptocurrency and a lot further ahead in terms of useful research.

And the method for getting there is scamming people with a pump and dump coin (that will almost certainly not accomplish what I mentioned).

I do agree that many altcoins are "pump and dump", as i have been a miner for years now. But also a lot of these altcoins never became incorporated and masked their identities, IPs, ext... We are fully open with who we are, with pictures to our names and we are 100% compliant with US laws, we are a registered non profit with my name and information on their.

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 :)

Your lack of an IPO doesn't imply pump and dump. Making an altcoin that is deceptive and speculative.

"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.

Actually non of the money goes towards protein folding, its the power of the folders that does. All of the FLDC (money) goes directly to those that fold.

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

>Actually non of the money goes towards protein folding, its the power of the folders that does. All of the FLDC (money) goes directly to those that fold.

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.

If the system updates difficulty in the way Bitcoin does, they'd get a week's worth of coins quickly, then the difficulty would climb to compensate. That's not a big problem.

I think I might trade a global economic crisis for a fast protein folding algorithm.

But with FLDC, you can have both :) The ASIC miners for Bitcoin cannot fold proteins, we are trying to bring in the Altcoin miners still using CPU and GPUS

"Protein folding / structure prediction is NP-complete, so seems unlikely."

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.

You can compute the free energy but that's not cheap. Still that doesn't give you a definitive answer to folded or not folded. It tells you more folded or less folded.

Having a person manually check something is an O(1) operation.

Even for the computer it is Ω(n), because it must transmit the entire problem to the person.

> ASICs.

D. E. Shaw already has a machine for it http://www.dfi.uchile.cl/~jsgonzal/aton.pdf

Ah yes the ANTON :) We would love for this to become readily available to the public. However it is expensive at this point. But I love this source and will be calling this company very soon, thank you.

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.

Some formulations of protein folding are NP complete. That doesn't mean those models always correspond to reality. There's no evidence that nature is solving an NP hard problem when folding proteins (See the paper NP complete problems and physical reality by Scott Aaronson)