Interesting insight in this Token Fest video - looks like Veriblock scheduled to use Vorksholk's CureCoin for their initial use-case - that's great news. Any ETA on GA and integration of CURE (assuming this is the awaited next-gen version of CureCoin).

https://youtu.be/uAuEX99dTGA see 04:25 for the CureCoin use-case introduction.

There are well over 6000 registered CureCoin team member accounts on Folding@home ... with an average of ~10% (600) of those actively folding on any given day. Most of the top folders are merge-folding with FoldingCoin. http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_list.php?s=&srt=1&t=224497&p=1

From what I've learned in slack, CureCoin SHA miners compete with staking wallets. As ASIC technology advances, SHA miners can find mining CURE profitable during market gains- which is evident by the number of coins that come up for sale during price run-ups. That said, the coin is not dependent on PoW, since PoS still achieves distributed consensus on the chain. The devs originally put PoW in place to help miners without GPU folding equipment participate in the coin, but also to make sure the chain could be secured with very light-weight mining equipment in case too few wallets were staking in the beginning.

Although I'm obviously not a crypto-currency expert, I've been folding for longer than CureCoin has been around. The results of distributed protein folding research are made open source to any institute or private industry. Any patents resulting from the research are required to be made available for sale to private industry (although the NIH has stepped in to help further develop some research themselves - especially in the areas of Alzheimer's).

Contrary to common cynicism, the research done by distributed computing projects like Folding@home, Rosetta@home and GPUgrid is still in its infancy. There are so many factors effecting the molecular dynamics simulations being performed (right down to the quantum level), that an enormous amount of computing power will be required for decades to come - IF we want to understand them. The economics of this is what make research coins interesting to me. Up until recently, retaining long term volunteers for these projects has been a challenge - at the same time NIH, NSF and ERC funding has been flat or lower than 2002 levels (forget any dedicated HPC systems being built by any government specifically for this purpose until breakthroughs start materializing - the world's militaries still get the majority of use from supercomputers).

I look at Curecoin et al as helping expand the foundations of knowledge for biophysics.

Stretch - yes - however that's all the data available to the public isn't it? In a 16+ year history of FAH, it's doubtful there is much of a paradigm shift between 2013 and 2017. Their #iamoneinamillion campaign is just starting to gain minimal traction. You are free to mine social media for female accounts posting about #Foldingathome, #WGC, #Rosetta, etc and make your own conclusions. Report back and let everyone know.

There are certainly women and girls who participate, but they are rare (many obvious female FAH usernames appear to be Eastern European or Russian, so the survey may not have reached those individuals due to the language barrier if it was English only). It's rare to find female accounts online who post about FAH. More female participation == more adoption (and if they pick CureCoin, FLDC, or GRC - the more potential for spend-ability of these coins).

This was a great story CureCoin posted on their social media feeds (unfortunately it wasn't even caught by folding@home)... these are rare instances:
http://kjzz.org/content/402462/paradise-valley-schools-students-connect-worldwide-web-research

Good luck in your search...

one prevailing criticism of CureCoin -for years- has been its efficiency marred by the 20% SHA-256 miner reward...
so much in fact (cygnusxi indicated in slack) this has been a deal breaker with some recently interested power-player/adopters!

I believe this is the CC devs' attempt to ...

   * make CureCoin 99% efficient - where ~all of the computational power goes to research.
   * satisfy legacy CureCoin SHA miners - giving them something equally interesting (SigmaX) in terms of:
       - decentralization
       - quantum resistance
       - mini-blockchain with fast transaction times
       - most importantly; the same interesting security & consensus hooks for future functionality included in both chains

this should ultimately benefit you as a SHA miner through diversification - if it does not, you are likely in a small minority...

OK - yes, I see 60007/1.3.4. Wallets are all working. First PoFMined staking transactions came in this morning and payouts from the pool arrived this evening. Looks good (still would like auto-minting option, but that's a minor nit).
Looking forward to the 1.3.5 branch - Thanks

Quick question about the latest windows wallet download:

... just updated three wallets I manage to version 1.3.4 (to get on a version-tracking branch).
One question: should the wallets now be automatically unlocked for minting/staking when they are first opened, or do they still require console input?


If I just misunderstood the new tooltip, that's no problem, but it would be nice to have that option as a toggle in the future.

Thanks in advance.

You're mostly correct. There are some common misconception dating back to the launch of CureCoin about its efficiency. People also often confuse how CureCoin works with the way GridCoin Classic worked in the early days.

CureCoin is designed to split available coins roughly 80/20 between Folding@Home participants and SHA256 miners.

However today, since difficulty is high, SHA256 mining activity is unprofitable in CureCoin and therefore very low. PoS takes up the slack for the low SHA256 participation. So as I understand it , today CureCoin uses ~90% of electricity directly on science - with the remaining 10% energy being split between SHA mining and PoS transactions.

If you fold for CureCoin, or merge-fold with FoldingCoin, you can allocate 100% of your CPU AND GPU power to folding - no SHA256 parallel mining is required (like it used to be in GridCoin Classic). But you still have the choice to use an ASIC in mining pools that support CureCoin. At this point, CureCoin requires very little SHA256 mining power to remain viable (but in 1.0 it remains an option).

If I'm wrong, hopefully one of the devs will correct me.

Thanks for the explanation. Is there a decent info-graphic that shows how this works? I think it would really help bring the complexity down to earth for the "casual cruncher".

I'm not sure I know the full answer. I'd recommend asking on their ANN:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=603757.3080

My guess would be:

1. CureCoin probably felt teams don't want members who are folding with an unfair advantage competing against those who don't (monetization vs philanthropy). That was mentioned on the ANN somewhere.
2. FoldingCoin does let you stay on your own team, BUT you have to change your username (that's why if you want to merge-fold, you have to change your username to the FoldingCoin format)

Agree with you and hats off - Gridcoin really has created an eco-system. I need to do some more due diligence - I've just been doing rosetta and gpugrid for the past year but haven't taken the time to determine how the payouts work. Since there are so many projects, I assumed it was weighted by the number of RAC completed on each project rather than evenly spread.

I also agree with using science coins to introduce crypto-currency outside the bitcoin bubble. If they don't get bitcoin's value proposition, thanks to science coins, they don't have to.

I can say that the one personal turn-off I've had to gridcoin has been the introduction of Bitcoin Utopia. After reading incessant fan-boy posts about it during its introduction (especially by some of the loudest voices on the Folding EVGA forum of all places?!) tied my stomach in knots. People supporting it were like middle-school bullies with a condescending tone - lots of "IMHO..." and "MY Project... Bitcoin Utopia...". The same people pushing for Bitcoin Utopia on Gridcoin / BOINC were condemning CureCoin on Folding@Home (that tone you probably recognize - "greedy cure coiners", and "coin's for folding, NO THANK YOU!" - which I thought was ironic since the primary goal is to get more science done. Anyway that's been my personal experience, and I never looked at Bitcoin Utopia since.

BTW, remember you can merge-fold CureCoin with FoldingCoin and four other coins I believe, so it's more bang for your buck to check out merge-folding:

http://foldingcoin.net/2015/02/earn-fldc-on-the-curecoin-team/

You will have to change your FAH username for merge-folding to do something like "raitpngman_ALL_<your counterparty wallet address>".
That will become clear once you read the article.

For CureCoin, you MUST be folding for team 224497 (CureCoin Team) in order to earn CURE

It really depends on your rig, how fast it can process and return work units, and whether the work units are CPU or GPU based.

A dedicated gaming system with a decent GPU for example, might process up to four large jobs per day. New job downloads can be 1-2MB, while an upload (after processing) can be 2-4MB. So worst case that would total about 24MB/day (that's on the high side). Over a month that's about 720MB.

If you are doing CPU-only or NaCl work units on a laptop, the bandwidth requirement is much, MUCH less.

You can search foldingforum.org or boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/ for more specific answers on file size.

I would recommend if you're on a budget, stick with NaCl on FAH or some slow jobs, like rossetta@home on BOINC and meassure how much extra bandwidth they use of a couple days. Then look to buying the coins on exchanges. Currently, few people are making money on GridCoin or CureCoin, so you can pick these coins up at a fraction of what they actually cost most crunchers and folders to produce.

To me it's a bit of Apple vs Microsoft in the early days (although it's more Apples to Oranges). Both coins face similar challenges in terms of centralization (reliance of work units coming from Folding@Home or the BOINC networks).

Even though Gridcoin was able to decentralize it's coin (BTW no currency is truly decentralized, but that's another discussion), the transition came at a price of some exploits, and some user's lost coins along the way. The last Gridcoin reboot didn't seem to catapult it's true value inside the crypto community bubble.

CureCoin has faced its challenges with missed ETAs on CureCoin 2.0 (which will be decentralized) But has been stable through its two year history. Their plans are ambitious (esp. with SigmaX) but resources are limited.  Even if CureCoin released 2.0 today, it's value would likely come from outside the current bitcoin community (that's just my opinion). The true value for crypto purists would be in the SigmaX PoW.

Speaking of the broader crypto community, they continue to fixate on things like Litecoin, Dogecoin "To The Moon" :-D, and most recently Ethereum's Frontier is sucking up a LOT of GPU power. Some suggest science coins could create Ethereum tokens, which would be cool, but then it would just be an Ethereum version of FoldingCoin - which already lives on CounterParty, and derives it's value through donations distributed to protein folders.

The polarization between long-time distributed computing participants (anonymous altruists) and typical bitcoin investors (ethical egoist) could NOT be more opposed, and perhaps this is another challenge all science coins face. The loudest voices on bitcointalk tend to whip things into a schizophrenic frenzy in order to benefit themselves. This is truly unfortunate.

Some parting thoughts:

GridCoin has a large community with a diverse mix of projects, but it has some exploits in its history, and overall output of the BOINC network in terms of PetaFLOPs is about half that of Folding@Home. BOINC projects are hard to value. People are crunching 10x more RAC on MilkyWay than Rosetta@Home. It becomes a question of priorities. But certainly they have a larger platform to experiment on, like their Neural Network statistics server and the finance project they experimented with. Perhaps what makes GridCoin somewhat confusing to me (and I mine and hold it) is the eccentric relationship with bitcoin utopia whose RAC on the Gridcoin network exceeds the TOTAL out of the network by a factor of 40! Anyway it's all for a good cause, and Bitcoin Utopia did help fund the MilkyWay project and is designed to do "good", but to me, it's just a bit of an admission of defeat when the biggest incentive on a network is to mine bitcoins (with a lower case "b") instead of focusing energy on getting science done.

CureCoin and FoldingCoin (which can be merge-mined) have a single focus to help Folding@Home find drug-able states in proteins related to "deadly disease". They have a more stable history in terms of security. *IF* CureCoin ever gets 2.0 out of beta, it will add value since their new SigmaX blockchain is designed to be quantum computer resistant (I merge-mine and beta test SigmaX so I'm obviously biased in my opinions). But that being said, CureCoin and FoldingCoin are still dependent on one, albeit extremely large, distributed computing consortium of universities and institutions (incidentally Folding@Home is much more than just Stanford and even includes institutions like Hong Kong University of Science and Technology). On a small scale, CureCoin has proven it can be used to help fund it's underlying research without resorting to mining bitcoin. BTW, Nothing is easier for a newb than loading Folding@Home's NaCl client in a chrome browser and registering on the folding pool.

Diversification is always the best bet. I wouldn't be putting my life savings into any of these ventures individually, but they all make an interesting hedge.

Right now, the majority of viable high-end GPU mining power is pointed at Ethereum which has had over $17 million invested in it, along with recent Microsoft certification.

IMHO CC 2.0 / SigmaX, despite delays, both have the potential to bring a lot of unique features to crypto other blockchain technologies simply don't offer - beyond DCN research.

Staying diversified eliminates un-necessary anxiety :-)

Certainly folding has been the end of many video game addictions ... the guilt alone (whether justified or not) takes care of those cravings.

Any science coin is only as decentralized as the source of its proof of work (in this case, distributed University Consortiums (Stanford or Berkeley)).

Their initial model (GridCoin Classic) was somewhat inefficient, and suffered from a few damaging hacker attacks. They switched to a decentralized blockchain model (they call it proof of research) by April 2015 which induced some further growing pains, but it looks like they stabilized the wallets. Their security algo I believe is based on Peercoin (like CureCoin) but they got rid of their pre-mine. CureCoin's decentralized 2.0 design has a more ambitious quantum-computer-proof algo (and a mini-blockchain designed for faster transactions), as such it has taken longer to implement in order to avoid being a "me too" decentralized science coin and to avoid introducing unnecessary churn. Notice CURE has only needed one security update since inception, Gridcoin has had numerous wallet updates to patch security and usability issues. This stuff isn't childs-play

This is just my biased opinion, and I do participate in Gridcoin myself - Crunchers have many projects to chose from on BOINC, and as such tend to concentrate crunching on projects which award the most points (or that they personally decide are worth-while). They aren't necessarily medical research related (like Rosetta@Home, or WGC), instead Milky Way seemed to be high on the list of priorities last I checked. While Milky Way is a very interesting distributed computing model predicting orbital mechanics of our galaxy, projects like it don't necessarily address more immediate needs, yet can be a priority for Grid crunchers.

An interesting dilemma with pure medical research - I've recently tried convincing a couple of people into Folding@Home participation (not even talking about coins), but they'd rather use their computational power to help SETI since they feel folding proteins only serves to help Big Pharma, as misguided as that may be. FAH results are made public.

Gridcoin valuation represents a POW on a mixture of diverse projects. Due to this diversity, Grid's user-base is broader. But their computational output in PetaFLOPs is lower due to most projects being CPU rather than GPU based (someone correct me if I'm wrong). In fact the CureCoin team at one point was producing more PetaFLOPs than the entire BOINC network (not just Grid) primarily due to the efficiency and optimization of GPU folding.

In conclusion - you have several choices in the Science Coin realm, and diversification is never a bad thing where financial matters are a concern.

Usually FUD is introduced in financial markets when people want to exert selling pressure so they can "back up the truck" and load up :-)
But OK, fair enough - nobody is happy about the valuation when everyone is aware of how much goes into folding:

But, “dropped the ball”!? In two years they've been:

• Listed on over three exchanges, including livecoin (which allows BTC to fiat exchange)
• Available on coinpayments.net … exposing CURE to over 18,000 potential vendors
• Set records in Work Units & Points Produced by a single team in the shortest time
• Very minimal security breaches (the IRC bot incident) unlike other coins in the same space
• Ongoing communications with retailers and charities (if you watch social media)
• Periodic media articles (most recently in Finance Magnates)
• Practically all self-funded by the core team
• Attending several Bitcoin conferences plus participated in a Tedx
• Influential force: TM's actively participate on folding forums & folding reddits (and in FAH beta testing)
•   Actually introduced the idea of CureCoin funding new research in the future
  
• Fast assistance on the forum from a supportive community
• And yes, 2.0 is still in beta, BUT you can download it from testnet and become a beta tester.

If you have a lot of skin in the game, let’s ask some questions:

• Have you done anything to promote the fundamental principles that underly CureCoin's value?
• Made any social media posts about CureCoin’s potential lately?
•     Look what Andreas Antonopoulos does for Bitcoin, and he’s not even a core dev!!!
• Talked to local businesses into accepting CURE, or give discounts to folders?
• Have you given CURE wallets to friends and family?
• Donated any CURE to the addresses published on the homepage over the last year?
• Are you staking your wallet to help secure the network?
• Are you folding?

Sorry - had to chime in on this thread. Hopefully this didn't come off as a rant - I'm just trying to remind people of all the accomplishments rather than dwelling purely on valuation. I had a conversation with a friend who really KNOWS PEOPLE. He loves this project as many of us do, but after attending a retreat with his company in LA, where the key-note speaker was a famous geneticist, he looked around and noticed - no one was paying attention. He concluded (paraphrasing here, he used harsher language) "<most people> just aren't yet savvy enough to grasp the concept of protein folding - let alone adding a crypto-currency layer like CureCoin on top of it"

With the right exposure, this can be much more than a "coin", it can be a global movement against a common enemy - disease.
It just takes time for these things to crystallize in people's minds in an instant gratification world. Hopefully sooner than later.

Cheers!

first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Yes there is a benefit of earning proof-of-stake (POS) when the coins are in your own wallet ... download the wallet from:

https://cryptocointalk.com/topic/2144-emercoin-emc-information/

Skip down to downloads. After installing create a receiver address and send your coins from POLO to the address.

With proper redundant backups (throw one into your safety deposit box) you coins are probably safer than sitting on an exchange - esp if they gain in value and the exchange gets hacked (like what happened to Cryptsy although POLO I think is pretty tight - you just never know after Gox)