Vertcoin

Please add Vertcoin

I'd completely drop the Crypto bit, as it comes from "kryptos", the Greek word for "hidden"... IMHO it clashes horribly with the rest of the Latin sentence, and should be translated into Latin as well. But then of course, it wouldn't have the same ring to it anymore...

Well, it might start as a joke, but when the coin cap is reached, inflation will suddenly grind to a halt, and everyone will have a stash roughly proportional to how long they mined and how much they invested...
I think this is actually a very fair minting rate. Now, I haven't checked whether the coin limit can humanly be reached

Good job, I hope this goes well!
If you can get them to handle the folder rewards, it will make the project that much more robust by removing one potential point of failure. Couldn't be much better, since the folding has to be centralized anyway.
Do not surrender the ability to add other projects into Curecoin though, as this is where decentralization will come from Btw I would suggest World Community Grid as another set of projects. They cover diseases (cancer, AIDS...) and environmental issues (energy, water...). You can pick which projects to support.
Current projects:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/viewAllProjects.do
Past projects:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/viewAllProjects.do?proj=comp

A few more questions:

Are you sure you want to put proof of stake into the coin? It will be an incentive for miners to stop mining, but also folders to stop folding when nearly all the coins have been issued.

I suppose there will be transaction fees. Are these going to be shared with folders as well, to promote folding when we get close to the maximum number of coins?

Haha

Don't take it against you, it is just that I wish to see the project succeed as well, so I'm probing for flaws. Since I can think of many and no details were given to reassure me, I can only speculate.

So yes, do expect me to look for flaws, but only so they can be addressed (if there are any in the first place). Errors can be made, but they need to be addressed properly. In open-source projects, I think it is everybody's duty to think critically.


As a side note, some people were talking about exploiting Gridcoin with modified clients, further up in the thread. Let me say that I am not convinced at all by the announced fix. Including the BOINC hash into the chain does not change the fact that this md5 hash is reported by the client. Yet nobody raised an eyebrow. Did I miss something important there, or is the fix still flawed?

Well, anonymous is the most obvious example, but I can basically choose anyone who does not have a Curecoin account and will therefore never complain about missing payments. If anonymous does not work, I can move down the list. PS3 for instance. You cannot block everybody.

Thank you for your answers Vorksholk and Cryptobullion.

Let me clarify my position: I don't mean the currency will not work anymore if the folding payments stop, since as you pointed out, it is still a standard SHA-256 currency when you remove the folding part.
What I meant is that the added-value of Curecoin (vs Bitcoin for instance) will disappear. Of course, you can argue that what has been done cannot be undone. This is true, however it won't be able to generate any scientific value anymore. When this is the case, why would I want to support Curecoin? As you said, what has been done cannot be undone: nothing will be lost if I move on and switch to Bitcoin.

Regarding the payment of folders "going down", I don't mean temporarily, but forever. I don't question your integrity, but I don't like the fact that the possibility is there. I really dislike the fact that a crypto-currency cannot survive without its creators (and with the whole range of features, not just as yet another Bitcoin clone).
If the need ever arises someday, I suppose the community could still come to a consensus to fork the client then, but still.

I don't have the same objections with the centralization inherent to folding. I fully appreciate that scientific work has to be centralized, the most obvious reason being to check it against duplicates assigned to other computers. Moreover, as it was mentioned in the original post, more projects can be added.

When I asked about how the payments of folders are handled, I meant: where are the newly minted coins going? Are they going to a single address that will redistribute them? What if the private key of this address is compromised?
Vorksholkalso wrote:
So, a few questions:
- I sign up on FAH with the username Vorksholk just to troll you. Do you receive your rewards, my rewards (i.e.: 0 because I'm a troll) or both?
- If both, then why wouldn't I be able to register to your folding site with the username "anonymous", which is the username totaling the highest numbers of point on FAH?

Regarding the bloating of the block chain induced by decentralizing the payments of folders, I think it is not a problem. We are just talking about some transactions that will have to be added to the blockchain anyway, regardless of whether they are issued in a decentralized fashion or by the central authority. And if I recall well, the issue of storage of the blockchain was studied by Satoshi in the initial paper. The conclusion was that even without Merkle trees, it would not be a problem.

One more question: is the 50/50 ratio between miner rewards and folder rewards set in stone? My bet is that it will end up rewarding miners more if the coin goes mainstream, since there will be many more folders than miners (everybody has a computer, not everybody wants to invest into an ASIC). More people = less rewards.

Can you please explain in detail the procedure how folding rewards will be paid to folders?

This looks like a very sensitive process to me, because as I understand it, it is the most centralized aspect of the coin: other research projects could be added into the coin to alleviate the reliance on FAH, but if the central payment system for folders goes down for whatever reason, it takes the coin with it.
Moreover I think one of the charms of crypto is that you put your trust in cold, hard protocol instead of people. No matter how honest and good-willed they are, I just don't feel it's crypto anymore if I have to rely on a handful of people for the system not to burst into flames...

I have exposed an idea on the Curecoin forum to decentralize the payments, similar to how mining rewards work, but that would involve giving a severe pounding on the web servers of FAH, and I have no idea whether they could withstand it or not. I suppose from their point of view it would look like a DDoS attack... Maybe the dev funds could be spent toward supplying them with adequate servers.

There was a discussion in the Curecoin thread about Gridcoin. Yeah it does look like hijacking, but this is not the point.

The concept of Gridcoin is that you get higher mining rewards if you are running research projects using the application BOINC.

Some people pointed out you could exploit Gridcoin by using a modified client and not running BOINC at all though. Having checked the source code, I agree: there is just a function checking for some stuff, like the md5 of the BOINC executable, but this could be modified to return anything you want.
The source code can be found here: https://github.com/gridcoin/Gridcoin-master/blob/master/src/boinc/boinc/modUtilization.vb
Check the function VerifyBoincAuthenticity().

The developer of Gridcoin stepped in and answered this:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=330685.msg3560465#msg3560465


This seems rather off to me. No matter what you do with the md5 hash, the hash is still retrieved by the Gridcoin client, which can be easily modified given that we have the source. No matter what the protocol is, it can only work using what the client sends...?

I was surprised to see the other users seemed convinced by this explanation.

Did I miss something? Is there any way the other nodes of the network can actually make sure the block header hasn't been faked?