Actually folding is sort-of similar to a one-way function. It's difficult to compute, but easy to verify. The verification is the calculation of the energy.
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 hashing function is the Bitcoin network. FLDC is simply in 140 bytes of data inside a BTC transaction. Thats why we chose to go with Counterparty, all computational power that users donate to the FAH program goes 100% in the project, and the existing miners for BTC are the ones who hash FLDC
Mentioned this in my first post. Basically the currency is a speculative asset that doesn't do anything for DNA folding since the amount you lose from monetary supply increase is could just be donated through bitcoin to DNA folding.
Your right, the currency directly does not do anything, but in the crypto currency space people love the altcions. There are arguments for both sides on the value and the need for altcoins but the fact remains that people mine them.
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.
Stanford. Indeed, this is centralization. But as others have mentioned, it's much more like "exchange your CPU time for equity in our security" than it is like "participate in our distributed, decentralized currency." No sustainable decentralized currency could use inputs like protein folding, SETI, etc.
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.
Well said. A lot of my time in forums is spent explaining the benefits of Counterparty. It is a fantastic platform that allows anyone with any skill set to create an altcoin, known as an asset or token in the CP world.
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/
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.