The problem I see with your suggestion of the algorithm is that it hurts the effectiveness of the science behind it. Theoretically an algorithm could be written that could fold protein by itself so we wouldn't use f@h but still fold proteins however there are 3 problems with this.

1) F@H has been working on what they have been doing for 10 or more years and they have a very nice system in place for validation and all of that. Plus there points system runs off of comparing what your machine can do compared to a test system which results in increased costs for the curecoin devs who will need to set this up. Getting a validated system is quite hard but you would need a near perfect one in place before you started otherwise people could cheat the system by submitting invalid units - a problem that F@H has experienced a few times in the past I believe. Also I believe F@H is not fully open source - because people could exploit the code and use it to submit invalid work units so this code would need to be written from scratch.

2) The folding of random problems by itself would be useless - we would need a list of what proteins to fold and these are normally developed in Stanford laboratories and then submitted to the network. The cost in research time and equipment to determine what proteins to fold is probably close to if not in the millions of dollars something which I doubt the developers can afford. However, without this step done beforehand it would not be possible to start the coin.

3) The whole point of F@H is to get protein results which are then taken back to the lab and tested out to confirm how useful they are - the computing portion is done to lower the number of possible choices because testing every possible combination would take forever and not be effective. As a result more work would need to be done in order to do the actual science or the protein folding is again useless.

And what you said about the Asics I disagree - I think the network will manage itself. 20% of the coins is still a decent amount and I think it would attract Asics from people who have Asics that are no longer effective for Bitcoin mining (such as first generation Bitcoin Asics from Avalon or Butterfly labs). A lot of these people will/can turn to Bitcoin and then the profitability of the network will manage itself.

I understand that the network could become screwed by a few Asic miners but I also believe that as the coin will attract enough Asic miners to keep it secure.

I like your idea of removing the Asics from the equation and sticking with a F@H algorithm but I believe that the time (years) and the money (close to millions) would probably take so much time that it is not worth  it and probably very difficult to get backing for.

Also to address your question about the primes the reason they are able to do it is because the prime computing doesn't really build off any outside research and the code for how to calculate prime numbers on a laptop is pretty widely available so you just need to modify it some - it is a much simpler calculation and it is a lot easier to confirm whether or not someone has submitted a valid answer.

Hope this helped - I don't know it all perfectly but that is based of my knowledge and research someone else on the project probably has more to add/update with this.



Thanks,
Cameron

Several months ago I remember reading on the curecoin website that this coin would be proof of stake as well as proof of work like peercoin. If that's true, then having a bunch of ASIC's mining wouldn't be required to secure the network. A single raspberry Pi could do that.

I asked earlier in this thread if curecoin was still PoW/PoS or just PoW like bitcoin. Hoping all of that will be revealed at or right before launch.

Also, there's a legitimate reason why this coin isn't using 'newer' technology like scrypt/scrypt-N/etc - it's because folding requires use of your CPU/GPU. If curecoin were an scrypt-based coin, some folders would point their folding rigs at mining the coin directly instead, and taking away from the most important part of this whole thing. The dev's seem to be on the right track with this coin. I really hope it works out, as people who fold could now potentially be compensated for the time and money spent helping to find cures for various diseases.