Gridcoin vs curecoin

[raitpngman]

I invested in curecoin and then found out about gridcoin. Both are "help the medical world" coins. Which one has better LONG term prospects and why? Are there other coins in this sphere?

[canth]

I invested in curecoin and then found out about gridcoin. Both are "help the medical world" coins. Which one has better LONG term prospects and why? Are there other coins in this sphere?

It depends whether Gridcoin plans on rebooting again and confiscating any coins that aren't burned, again. Yeah, I missed out on this and lost a bunch of GRC that I'd mined back in 2014. Just something to be wary of.

http://wiki.gridcoin.us/Gridcoin-Classic

- Former Gridcoin holder, now empty bagholder.

[arseaboy]

I invested in curecoin and then found out about gridcoin. Both are "help the medical world" coins. Which one has better LONG term prospects and why? Are there other coins in this sphere?

maybe you might need to visit their website or section here for any further updates, much better to know future plans of dev before engaging yourself to any investment. good luck mate.

[K210]

Foldingcoin is better than both of them but thats just my opinion

[assistresearch]

I invested in curecoin and then found out about gridcoin. Both are "help the medical world" coins. Which one has better LONG term prospects and why? Are there other coins in this sphere?

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.

[raitpngman]

BTW, Nothing is easier for a newb than loading Folding@Home's NaCl client in a chrome browser and registering on the folding pool.

Thanks for your comments. I went to the various websites and pages for the coins. However, being new I didn't really learn anything useful from an investment standpoint. I learned more from your post than hours of reading.

As far as folding, I was going to do that but it said I should have a broadband connection. I have 3g sometimes but my internet is prepay by the megabyte. My guess is that I would spend way more in internet than I would get in coins. Does anyone know how many megabytes/hour or day is used by folding?

[assistresearch]

BTW, Nothing is easier for a newb than loading Folding@Home's NaCl client in a chrome browser and registering on the folding pool.

My guess is that I would spend way more in internet than I would get in coins. Does anyone know how many megabytes/hour or day is used by folding?

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.

[raitpngman]

Ok, I'll try one of the small jobs on a cpu and see what I get. It would be fun to run it now and then anyways.

[raitpngman]

Do I have to register with a team to get my curecoins or can I leave it team 0?

[K210]

Both have good long term prospects i would invest in both.

[assistresearch]

Do I have to register with a team to get my curecoins or can I leave it team 0?

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

[assistresearch]

Do I have to register with a team to get my curecoins or can I leave it team 0?

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.

[traderman]

The fact that the BU credits eclipse the rest of the projects has no bearing on the rewards!!! Gridcoin accounts for the difference, BU miners get the same share of the daily mint as the rest of the 34 whitelisted Boinc projects by Gridcoin.

BTW, Nothing is easier for a newb than loading Folding@Home's NaCl client in a chrome browser and registering on the folding pool.

Thanks for your comments. I went to the various websites and pages for the coins. However, being new I didn't really learn anything useful from an investment standpoint. I learned more from your post than hours of reading.

As far as folding, I was going to do that but it said I should have a broadband connection. I have 3g sometimes but my internet is prepay by the megabyte. My guess is that I would spend way more in internet than I would get in coins. Does anyone know how many megabytes/hour or day is used by folding?

[spassbold]

I invested in curecoin and then found out about gridcoin. Both are "help the medical world" coins. Which one has better LONG term prospects and why? Are there other coins in this sphere?

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!

I think you have a slight missunderstanding how Gridcoin rewards work, Bitcoin Utopia does not pay out more Gridcoins than any other project. Each project pays out exactly the same amount of coins, independent of how easy it is to get RAC in each project. How many coins you get depends on (your RAC/sum of all RAC in this projet in team gridcoin).

So Bitcoin Utopia does not "produce" any more coins than any other project.

As you can already imagine, I have a very strong preference towards Gridcoin, as it is the only decentralized coin out of the three, which is a must for any cryptocurrency.

This was technically very hard to pull off, but it works and now with the recent addition of the pool (pool.gridcoin.co) it has also become easy for newcomers to mine/research. Gridcoin also works for many projects and not only a single project.

Another big advantage is the possibility for custom projects, which does not exist for the other coins. It is possible to create commercial projects, for example for stock trading, machine learning, data mining,... that uses the computational power of the Gridcoin network for free (it's a whitelisted BOINC project basically) and for this has to so something in order to stay whitelisted, for example buy coins on the markets and send them to a burn address.

This would truly raise the value of Gridcoin and also makes sense for the commercial application, as the computing power is still much cheaper than commercial servers. This is where I see the true potential of Gridcoin. But a fixed amount (say 80%+ of all computing power in team Gridcoin should always go to science for free).


edit: The reason why I think these "science coins" will become much more valuable is that it is very easy to convince people not in crypto before how good of an idea they are, see for example here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/4b4drk/a_currency_minted_by_doing_science/

[assistresearch]

I invested in curecoin and then found out about gridcoin. Both are "help the medical world" coins. Which one has better LONG term prospects and why? Are there other coins in this sphere?

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!

This was technically very hard to pull off, but it works and now with the recent addition of the pool (pool.gridcoin.co) it has also become easy for newcomers to mine/research. Gridcoin also works for many projects and not only a single project.
...

edit: The reason why I think these "science coins" will become much more valuable is that it is very easy to convince people not in crypto before how good of an idea they are, see for example here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/4b4drk/a_currency_minted_by_doing_science/

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.

[Grctest]

I invested in curecoin and then found out about gridcoin. Both are "help the medical world" coins. Which one has better LONG term prospects and why? Are there other coins in this sphere?

It depends whether Gridcoin plans on rebooting again and confiscating any coins that aren't burned, again. Yeah, I missed out on this and lost a bunch of GRC that I'd mined back in 2014. Just something to be wary of.

http://wiki.gridcoin.us/Gridcoin-Classic

- Former Gridcoin holder, now empty bagholder.

On one hand, the burn period was 6 months long during a switch from proof of work to proof of stake, it was pretty difficult not to know it was going on.

On the other, lessons learned - proof of burn should be performed via snapshot & import wallet sharedrop method (like BTS).

There will be no such transition again though, so you should get crunching again using the pool.

I've been looking into proof of burn on Gridcoin to project rain custom assets onto Gridcoin users: https://cryptocointalk.com/topic/44611-monitoring-selfburn-addresses-for-custom-beacons/

[Grctest]

Foldingcoin is better than both of them but thats just my opinion

Foldingcoin has a central issuing authority though.

It'd be very cool if we could port folding@home's user statistics to the BOINC scoring system in order to earn GRC for folding.

[Grctest]

Do I have to register with a team to get my curecoins or can I leave it team 0?

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

Why not open curecoin up to all teams?

[assistresearch]

Do I have to register with a team to get my curecoins or can I leave it team 0?

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

Why not open curecoin up to all teams?

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)

[assistresearch]

The fact that the BU credits eclipse the rest of the projects has no bearing on the rewards!!! Gridcoin accounts for the difference, BU miners get the same share of the daily mint as the rest of the 34 whitelisted Boinc projects by Gridcoin.

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".