Calling the Bitcoin community to help battle COVID-19

[KingOfBeans]

I came across this tweet, calling the Bitcoin community to help battle COVID-19: https://twitter.com/m__btc/status/1239095140356165632

Let's unite the #Bitcoin community to battle #COVID19!

Download Folding@home and use unused GPU/CPU power to help
@Stanford
 analyze important COVID-19 data like potential drug targets.

Join team 'BuyBitcoin' (#238906). Select 'Any disease' for COVID-19

https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/

What is it?
Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project, created by Stanford University, for disease research that simulates protein folding, computational drug design, and other types of molecular dynamics. As of today, the project is using the idle resources of personal computers owned by volunteers from all over the world. Thousands of people contribute to the success of this project. More information can be found on their website: https://foldingathome.org/

How does it work?
You simply download Folding@Home and use your unused CPU/GPU power to analyze data from Stanford.

What happens with the data?
Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University’s Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money from it. Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication.

Following the publications of these scientific articles, we will make the raw data of the folding runs available to other researchers upon request. The data sets from some of our most prominent simulations are already publicly available. We’ve also striven to share our key technologies with other scientists, to assist their research as well.

How can I help

• Retweet/like/share the this tweet to help spread the word: https://twitter.com/m__btc/status/1239095140356165632
• Download Folding@Home here: https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/
• Join team number 238906 to join team 'BuyBitcoin'. The more points, the higher the position in the global leaderboard. Help fight COVID-19 and shill Bitcoin!

@Moderators, I know this might not be posted in the right section but this definitely deserves a lot of attention imo. Folding@Home has been proven very effective in the past and this is a great opportunity for the Bitcoin community to contribute. We have a lot of CPU/GPU power that can be put to good use!

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[TheNewAnon135246]

Great initiative, downloading it now. I remember running Folding@Home on my PS3, I think it came pre-installed. At some point the published statistics of the amount of data analyzed by all PS3 owners, was pretty impressive.

[Pmalek]

Be careful what you download, even if it is claimed that it is for a good cause. It wouldn't be the first time someone has misused a time of crisis to gain profit for themselves. Not saying that is the case here but like always: "Don't trust. Verify"!

[bitbunnny]

Be careful what you download, even if it is claimed that it is for a good cause. It wouldn't be the first time someone has misused a time of crisis to gain profit for themselves. Not saying that is the case here but like always: "Don't trust. Verify"!

I agree with that. Of course that is good and noble thing to support such initiative to fight corona virus but we also need to think about security and safety in the cyber world, so check everything before you start to download something on your computer.

[Coyster]

If this is going to be my little way of contributing to combat this deadly virus, then I'm taking that opportunity in leaps and bounds, it's an ingenious dea and the 'brains' behind this deserves commendation. This virus is yet to reach the shores of my country, but if I can help others from the comfort of my home, I'll take it up and I'll enjoin others to do the same, once I verify all the security issues and possible breaches I'll download it asap.

[TheNewAnon135246]

Be careful what you download, even if it is claimed that it is for a good cause. It wouldn't be the first time someone has misused a time of crisis to gain profit for themselves. Not saying that is the case here but like always: "Don't trust. Verify"!

Check out their website. Folding@Home is a Stanford University project and has been around for many years. Regarding their source code:

FAH is built from several open source tools, namely Gromacs (http://www.gromacs.org), TINKER (http://dasher.wustl.edu), and AMBER (http://ambermd.org/) for MD packages and MPICH for MPI (http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/mpich/). If you’re interested in checking out these codes, you should feel free to download them and check them out. One can compile a SMP version of Gromacs by using the latest Gromacs with MPICH. This would reproduce the SMP clients we have on FAH.

Most of the critical parts of FAH are publicly available. The Tinker and Gromacs source codes can be downloaded and run. Unlike many computer projects, the paramount concern is not functionality, but the scientific integrity, and posting the source code in a way that would allow people to reverse engineer the code to produce bogus scientific results would make the whole project pointless. However, we stress that the vast majority of our code is already open source. We have an Open Source FAQ with more details.

[KingOfBeans]

Great to see these reactions! As some already said, F@H is a legit project that has been around since the early 2000's. Here is all COVID-19 related material on their Github: https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/coronavirus

Should you decide to help out, don't forget to enter team number 238906 to join team 'BuyBitcoin'. The higher we are ranked in the leaderboard, the more people we'll expose to Bitcoin!

[kryptqnick]

I've heard of Folding home before, I remember that this project succeeded in finding out something via community efforts that scientists could not figure out. I did not know they were working on COVID-19 these days. I can see that people are complaining that some things are buggy and, more importantly, that COVID-19 isn't even an option there, a person has to choose 'ANY' and believe them when they say that COVID-19 is prioritized... These complaints are from yesterday on their official Twitter account and my inability to find anything on their website that is dedicated specifically to COVID-19 is frankly what got me looking for their Twitter in the first place. I'm hesitating now, I'll see how they react and decide to proceed. But that's a good initiative from you, op!

[TheNewAnon135246]

My inability to find anything on their website that is dedicated specifically to COVID-19 is frankly what got me looking for their Twitter in the first place.

It's literally at the top of the front page: https://foldingathome.org/2020/03/10/covid19-update/

They also posted everything that is being researched on Github, see the post above yours.

[Artemis3]

Is there a folding@home linux distro, that can be flashed to a usb for easy use on gpu mining rigs? I doubt many of us are actually running windows or a full ubuntu and not some highly customized mining os, so we would need an easy way to apply this to rigs.

I'm familiar with folding@home, it uses free and open source clients. Most distros should have it in their official repositories, so i doubt you need any specific distro for it. You might even be able to run binaries, but i cannot say for sure if there is an specific distro just for folding@home (its probably possible to just run it in your mining distro, as long as you stop the mining process).

For Arch based distros, the AUR package name is "foldingathome". They also have Debian and Ubuntu official packages, i think for example HiveOS is Ubuntu based. Of course you'd need to do things like installing and running it in the console or via ssh on each rig (it will want to install and start its own service, so be aware).

As for joining groups, it doesn't really matter. You could make a bitcointalk group if you wanted, makes no difference. Stat bragging? There are several groups named Bitcoin and Corona...

While the humble group made by OP only has 2 workers, Reddit's "PC Master Race" group (225605) which called gamers worldwide to contribute their gpus to fight corona, currently has 2128805 workers. Not bad huh?

Also I'm not to sure who ends benefiting from this "volunteer help". Universities/research is the official tale, but does it go to big pharma in the end? I'd rather be something that cannot be patented.

PS: Joined OP's group, so make it 3.

[buwaytress]

User of Folding and SETI and all those @home projects since 2004 here;)

But good to be reminded every now and then to switch it on and contribute to a different, more urgent cause.

If anyone wants, as well, do check out the Italian Red Cross's campaign here: They've reached the target but I'm sure more won't hurt: https://app.helperbit.com/project/5e6a64ee84cb8662d901a29c/covid19-advanced-medical-post-for-pretriage-in-italy

Most importantly, stay home and stay safe everyone!

[TheNewAnon135246]

So far team 'BuyBitcoin' has already earned 78,335 points! Very cool to see the Bitcoin community unite and contribute to battling COVID-19.

[TheBeardedBaby]

Maybe you guys have to move this thread in the Mining section (or open a new one there). Not many miners are reading this section, they are active only in Mining.
This is a good cause, I have taken a part my rig long time ago. I'll see how I can join.

[alexsandria]

How can we help right now? If thete would be some fundraising that will happen in this forum that may help the community then let me know in order for me to help also for those person that are rally in need.
I also want to help my fellow people in order for them to have some goods also that may able to last them until the virus will ends. I hope everyone is doing good and staying at home so that there will be lessen the number of infected on the country that you guys are belong.

[buwaytress]

Haven't been able to get work units most of the past two or three days so I guess this means a lot of people are using this project now. That's a good thing! Looking on the FAH forums confirms most people get little or nothing in terms of work units too. I've never really experienced this before, FAH must be peaking in users.

Silver linings, right guys? I've switched to low config for now, yet to contribute a single point to team BuyBitcoin haha.

[buwaytress]

Just an update, and hoping to see more people sign up, it's not like we're getting any joy mining real crypto on our lousy devices right guys? Anywya, finally getting some work units today, but still a high failure rate when receiving the WU, though once connected, it's fine. Submitted my first units to Team Buy Bitcoin, yay! Second WU wasn't for coronavirus though but =)

[TheBeardedBaby]

Just joined so I'm here as well, working exaclty on the coronavirus. I can share only CPU power for now.
Viva Bitcoin!!! It's a good way to advertise it btw and show the world that we are helping too.
Just share this in twitter too, maybe more to come.

[buwaytress]

Be careful what you download, even if it is claimed that it is for a good cause. It wouldn't be the first time someone has misused a time of crisis to gain profit for themselves. Not saying that is the case here but like always: "Don't trust. Verify"!

I agree with that. Of course that is good and noble thing to support such initiative to fight corona virus but we also need to think about security and safety in the cyber world, so check everything before you start to download something on your computer.

Agree with it. Who knows what actually happens behind the scenes until they provide a public display of their process.
You never know if they are actually using the CPU/GPU power for data analytics or mining cryptocurrencies.
We should research in detail and verify before we actually take part in it.

It's a really old project and you can look it up yourself... which I would hope anyone would self-verify on their own.

I'll admit, I have no true idea of what happens behind the scenes, but there have been hundreds verifying the datalogs and this is a super old method (I myself used Seti@Home and then IBM's World Community Grid for very long time as well on a project related to mapping the human genome project.

It also existed long before crypto mining so... maybe it doesn't deserve this level of criticism.

Welcome @iasenko!

[buwaytress]

He has no idea what he's talking about. These kinds of posts are only made because of their signature campaigns.

Very cool to see 11 contributors so far, hopefully more will join! https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/238906

I know right? I see some guy there with so many WUs (is that you OP?), must be an old home rig he's now putting to a hopefully good cause;)

I'm running into work unit issues right now, and I see I'm still bottom of the pile, but that's expected on an old computer that I only connect to F@H when I'm working. I actually thought this flu virus was more or less like normal flu but it's getting more apparent that it's a little more than that right now.

Cheers team BuyBitcoin;)

[Chlotide]

It seems Linus (Linus tech tips) is getting involved and will soon host a server for F@H in his studio/house
https://youtu.be/KU4qOebhkfs
Not sure what actual breakthroughs these guys have helped achieve until now but will start donating my pc power too