Bitcoin Forum

LONG time lurker. Love this website! Anyhow I find that explaining the mining process is very difficult for non-tech people to non-tech people. Stanford University does a "folding proteins at home" thing that looks similar to mining. Anyone ever heard of it and is it a good comparison?

Thanks in advance.

The two things are very different things, very. Folding@Home folds proteins and helps humanity, mining is bruteforcing SHA256 hashes which benefit just the Bitcoin network and nothing else, everything else is wasted energy.

They both use shared computing power to solve calculations. That's why I thought that. Thanks for replying.

and thats where the similarity ends. its like calling a peach, an apple, simply because they both grow on tree's

For bitcoin you guess a number and if you're lucky you win.  If not, guess again.
For proteins you solve differential equations, like a giant physics problem.

Lol that's the perfect way to explain it to me! Thanks!

Yes... Or seti@home

In Folding@Home, you earn no money for your work, purchases, and expenses and power bill.

In mining, you make money.

Guess which one I chose!   ;D

I used to fold on my PCs.  I ran my own PC repair business on the side for years and I used to install F@H surreptitiously on people's computers as a service and advise them to keep the PC on at all times.  Never made me a damn penny, but it seemed like a noble thing to do for the greater good at the time.

DAMN do I wish I had heard of Bitcoin in late 2008 and knew the history of mining and price per coin it came to have!  I'd be a billionaire right now!  DAMMIT DAMMIT DAMMIT !!!!!!

In early 2010 I built a folding PC with 4 8800GTs in it, knowing nothing of Bitcoin.  What a misinformed fool I was........ :P

I used to do the SETI thing and loved the idea that I may help find ET or something similar. But yeah...give me $$ for my hash rates...

Last time I check folding@home doesn't give you a 'reward' for the efforts of your computer/ASIC. Not to mention they do completely different things - folding maps protein folding while Bitcoin mining involves brute-forcing hashes until you find one below the target. They really aren't the same thing - you'd be better off simply explaining what mining is.

I feel you mate, i used to play Dragons Tale which is how i got into Bitcoins back in 2012 i believe and i remember winning around 70 bitcoins, had as much as 100 bitcoins not long after. If only i`d kept them till they were $1000 each and not blown the lot on silk road while they were worth $10 each sigh..

I suppose it is all in how you look at things.

To me, they are identical.  I do both as an excuse to play with new toys.  It is fun to build your epeen stuffing as many GPU's as you can in one system or optimizing your ppd/$ err, ghash/$.  It doesn't make much difference to me whether I am folding proteins or making bitcoins.  Though, making bitcoins allows me to exchange the results of my work for more toys which is something you can't do by folding proteins.

So, if you are an outsider who doesn't know a bitcoin from a protein?  Well, yeah, they are pretty much the same ;)

But, if you are into mining bitcoins to make a profit, or you are a biologist trying to find a cure for cancer?  Yeah, then they are very, very different.

I think the best comparison I've heard was that mining is like solving very big sudoku puzzles. Current difficulty would set the number of lines required in the sudoku. As difficulty increases, the number of lines in the sudoku would increase. Think of a sudoku 20,000x20,000 lines... not easy to solve, but once solved, it's easy to verify with a pc. <-- I may have 'hidden' an example of proof-of-work in there too  ;)