
FoldingCoin - snikeris
http://foldingcoin.net/
======
lappa
The reason SHA256 was chosen is that it is a hash function. Hash functions are
meant to be easy to calculate but difficult or near impossible to reverse and
near impossible to optimize.

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.

~~~
jonas21
> Protein folding almost certainly has large optimization problem, an attacker
> likely could find ways to increase his mining power by orders of magnitude.

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.

~~~
lappa
>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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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.

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

~~~
PookTwo
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...](http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_summary.php?s=&t=226728)
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 :)

~~~
lappa
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.

~~~
PookTwo
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

~~~
lappa
>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.

------
mrb
A decentralized digital currency where the proof-of-work has a second utility
having a great commercial value (such as folding proteins) would be quite
frankly revolutionary and would have a good chance at displacing Bitcoin.

But FoldingCoin is not that currency, because there is a huge downside in
their design: they had to completely give up decentralization, which is the
primary innovation and differentiator that block chain-based currencies like
Bitcoin bring. Instead, FoldingCoin relies on the Stanford University
Folding@home network, on the stats reported by this network, to distribute
units of the currency proportionately to the amount of work. This means the
Folding@home network could alter the distribution of coins at will, if it is
attacked by hackers (likely), or if it operates maliciously (less likely).
This means FoldingCoin would be unable to continue operating the day a single
entity (the university) decides to stop running the Folding@home network. And
so on. All the inconvenients and risks of centralization exist with
FoldingCoin.

Trust me, I really wish it would be possible to design a decentralized digital
currency built on a protein-folding proof-of-work, but so far nobody has found
a way to do this in a decentralized way.

Edit: they openly acknowledge the fact FoldingCoin is not decentralized, see
[http://foldingcoin.net/fldc-vs-alts/](http://foldingcoin.net/fldc-vs-alts/) :
_" With Counterparty there is no current way of doing decentralized asset
creation and issuance"_

Edit #2: in theory a decentralized currency based on a protein-folding proof-
of-work can exist and would work this way: compute a hash of a block of
pending transactions and of the previous block hash (like Bitcoin). Use the
resulting hash as a seed to deterministically generate a set of protein-
folding problems. Miners try to solve them. Once a sufficient amount of these
problems is solved (depending on a "difficulty factor"), broadcast the
solutions and the transactions on the network, hence creating a new hash for
the next set of protein folding problems. I don't know very much about protein
folding, but as I understand the open problems are: (1) how to
deterministically generate a set of _useful_ protein-folding problems
according to rules that should stay immutable for decades (you can't ask the
participants to have to frequently update their mining software because
consensus on these rules is hard to change), and (2) how to reduce the size of
the solutions data published to the network every block without overflowing it
(it is my understanding that protein folding would generate way more than a
few hundred kilobytes every 10min which is the current average Bitcoin block
size).

~~~
haliax
Is it even possible to have a decentralized currency where the mining problem
isn't directly related to the maintenance of the ledger? Won't people just be
incentivized to mine rather than preventing double spends, and the like?

~~~
bbcbasic
I don't thinks so.

The proof of work needs to be tied to the block. It also needs to be very
quick to verify but hard to compute (like getting a hash under a certain
value). With scientific problems, you may need to solve a problem, then ever
node on the network solves the same problem to verify what you did - which
would waste a hell of a lot of resources!

~~~
PookTwo
We actually just had a double spend try and happen to us. I cannot show you
the links, because the blockchain already ignored them.

What happened was:

We run a fundraiser for helping in the expansion of foldingcoin
[http://foldingcoin.net/fundraising/](http://foldingcoin.net/fundraising/) and
we use a company called Vennd.io to help in this fundraiser.

What happens is someone will send BTC to a certain address, and in return they
are given an amount of 1 FLDC per every 0.00001 BTC they donated. Someone
recently tried to double spend a BTC transaction to trick Counterparty into
giving them double the FLDC in return for their BTC. However since the double
BTC was denied, so was the double FLDC.

I tweeted about it, but its no longer in the blockchain, here is the tweet
[https://twitter.com/FoldingCoin/status/558704804449771520](https://twitter.com/FoldingCoin/status/558704804449771520)
when it was solved, and here was the first tweet about the actual transaction
[https://twitter.com/FoldingCoin/status/558073025468567553](https://twitter.com/FoldingCoin/status/558073025468567553)

------
lkbm
Is this basically replacing Bitcoins and their proof-of-[useless]-work mining
with a new currency whose proof-of-work is useful work (IE, FAH)?

If this is viable, it would be pretty grand. As cool as Bitcoin is, it's sad
to me that it just eats up energy/computation time to ground its value.
Imagine if all that computation time were put to good, scientific use while
still providing the same proof-of-work benefit.

~~~
oafitupa
Unfortunately, it's not viable. Proof of work needs to be "wasteful" (if you
can consider validating transactions and keeping the network safe wasteful). I
don't understand why so many people get angry at Bitcoin's use electricity and
not at say, VISA's, or any other entity that isn't curing cancer.

~~~
nctr
There is also Proof of Stake to secure the network, which does not waste
electricity as much and on top of that the amount of stake you get for each
vote to secure the network could also be made dependent on the amount of work
you do for a science project as measured by BOINC.

The identification of which user gets what amount of "Proof of research" bonus
is done via hashed BOINC email, as the email in BOINC is private and cannot be
accessed by others.

See my other post about gridcoin.

~~~
PookTwo
But this has two issues if i am reading this right:

1\. Since only Gridcoin has the information of the users, than what is to
prevent them from creating fake accounts that they themselves hold and paying
themselves more Gridcoins?

2\. Unless if every single donor has an encrypted Comodo (or something
similar) email with Gridcoin, then emails can be stolen. And if gridcoin
becomes valuable enough and emails are not encrypted, then its a sure thing
that they will be stolen.

------
wyager
This is a terrible idea for several reasons, the chief of which is the fact
that the difficulty of protein folding simulations is not easily predicted.
One consequence of this is that if someone were to develop a more efficient
algorithm for protein folding, they could easily dominate the mining market
and pull off a 51% attack. You could argue that this might have a positive
societal impact, but it would also probably destroy the foldingcoin network.

The reason Bitcoin (and most/all other good proof-of-work systems) use
repeated application of a cryptographic hash is that it's A) very predictable
how long finding a solution will take (on average) and B) unlikely that
someone will destroy the proof-of-work system by inventing a more efficient
method of calculating the hash.

~~~
PookTwo
Where there is profit there is competition. As a miner years ago, i was able
to produce a lot of bitcoins with my GPU setup. When the ASICs came out i
tried to compete, but simply did not have the capital. But other people did.
And it wasnt just one person, it was a few big companies that did this.

So no longer is the individual able to mine BTC, its now a profession. So if
this happened to FLDC, that wouldnt really be a bad thing, because if it is to
happen, then that would mean FLDC has gained enough value for someone to pour
money into being the top folder. So then the economy of FLDC would be where
the general public has the interest and the Folders would simply be a
profession.

------
stegosaurus
Proof-of-work having secondary commercial utility is troublesome because it
can result in a situation where the secondary utility becomes more valuable
than the former, in which case the currency is liable to collapse.

I tend to think that proof-of-work must be inherently useless in order for it
to function for this reason - otherwise, it's not 'work'.

~~~
PookTwo
I disagree. I think that Counterparty adds value to the Bitcoin platform. I
envision BTC almost being like gold, not something that will ultimately be
used everyday. I think a token built inside of Counterparty will be that
everyday used token.

Its kind of like the internet, the original value of the internet was to
transfer files from point A to point B. Then came: email, the browser, instant
messaging, online shopping, social media, streaming, ext.....

This adds additional value to the Bitcoin blockchain thus making it more
desirable to have.

But i do agree that the miners should work on useless algorithms, that is the
best way to keep it just and fair, but building applications inside of that is
just fantastic

------
great_kraken
I recently was reading up on folding again. I thought, wouldn't it be great if
people could manage to combine protein folding for a good cause with bitcoin
mining. Cool idea.

------
Forbo
For a similar concept, there's also Gridcoin which uses the Berkeley Open
Infrastructure for Network Computing as it's proof of work.

[http://gridcoin.us/](http://gridcoin.us/)

------
web007
Sounds like [http://primecoin.io/about.php](http://primecoin.io/about.php) but
more widely useful. Good luck @PookTwo!

------
lbotos
Has anyone done the math to know if this is profitable in terms of power spent
to mine vs mined coin value?

~~~
askmike
This will be dominated by the price, which has been going down in the last 2
weeks [1].

[1][https://www.poloniex.com/exchange#btc_fldc](https://www.poloniex.com/exchange#btc_fldc)

------
grcnation
Really decentralized cryptographically secured rewards for advancing research:
Gridcoin (intro at [http://uscore.net](http://uscore.net))

------
jabgrabdthrow
"Useful proof-of-work" is still less desirable for the coin holders than
proof-of-stake, so capital will move out of this coin and into a POS coin

------
nosuchthing
Seems harder to solve algorithmically, rather than as a single private company
with clients who rent hardware / CPU / GPU time for hire.

------
mintplant
Can the result of one of these "Work Units" be easily checked for correctness?
Or does someone have to redo the work to confirm?

~~~
PookTwo
if you are a certified medical researcher you can request to review the WUs.
Many might not produce real results, but in the words of thomas edison:

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

