I think it is very nice that you are trying to get people to put their gpu power towards a worthwhile endeavor. Having said that, this is NOT a decentralized currency nor will it ever be. It is simply a token. You may as well give out gold stars for submitting shares.
Currently, the only scientifically useful coin with a true PoW which also serves a legitimate scientific purpose is Primecoin. I hope other will fine other hashing functions which are both useful PoW while also supporting a coin by being difficult to compute and easy to prove.
mechs is starting to come around to the curecoin side
no worries bro it will be fun to mine, even if there is some centralization. atleast the coin base itself will be as secure as any other alt coin. plus the added feature of "token" reward, but keep in mind its not tokens, its a fair share of the curecoins... i think thats a little different than a simple token system. It would be nice if BTC would offer this feature, but i dont see it being built into the code and forked into a foundation style coin to support research. ( that would be interesting though....)
as far as the pow=folding, look at my bump / quote of an email that cygnusxi posted that he received from professor vijay... ill dig it up..
here is my quoted post from cygnus and my comment on why did no one notice this and why can i find this info NO WHERE else on the web....
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=192033.msg2895888#msg2895888
