How to bring more adoption to FAH

[PookTwo]

Before reading this forum please know that i am NOT advocating you to switch FAH teams. The organization I work for is trying to bring more user adoption to FAH. What I am proposing allows you to stay on your current team. Please read this whole post before making a judgement

 

So how can we as a folding community bring more adoption to FAH?

 

Let's first compare the difference between a profitable organization and a non profit:

 

Nonprofits: Not for profit companies do a good job of providing services to the community. Funding and volunteering is done mostly by those who have an active interest in the organizations mission. FAH for example is attractive to those in the medical community (since the project helps in fighting diseases) and techies (since computers are involved in the creation of the medical research). Outside of these two kinds of individuals, adoption is limited.

 

For Profits: For profit businesses do a good job of getting particular services to the masses. Even though contributing resources and time to nonprofits make us all feel great, all of us still have to eat. Therefor a majority of our time and resources are spent working and supporting for profit businesses so the world economy can continue to go round and round. This is a very realistic reality that no one can argue - if you can't make money doing something, it will not expand as fast as there is no motive for personal gain and not as much growth for business operations.

 

But what happens when the two are combined?

 

Lets take a look at the only grid computing projects faster than FAH, and thats Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies. So why do people mine bitcoins?

 

Unlike other distributed computing platforms, since bitcoin is money it is actually profitable to contribute to unlike networks like BOINC and FAH. The more miners there are the less each one makes, so the price has grown with the mining power. Miners are awarded newly minted BTCs every 10 minutes for their contributions to the security and transaction verification of the network. This is done on a schedule and eventually there will be no more bitcoin created once 21 million are generated by miners. In 2009 a bitcoin was less than a penny, today it trades at almost $300

 

Bitcoin was originally created just by using you computer to mine, but in March 2013 venture capitalists saw an opportunity to create more mining efficient equipment since the popularity has grown exponentially and there was profit incentives for the VC’s to create these specialized mining devices. Now anyone with $5 can purchase a miner that uses virtually no energy (USB device) that mines BTC faster than a R9 290X.

 

BTC is done in Hashes and FAH is done in FLOPS. There is no direct translation from one to another, but a common consensus is 1 hash equals 12,700 FLOPS when comparing the 2 side by side. The FAH grid computing network has nearly 50 PetaFLOPS and is known as the world's most powerful computing network outside of the Bitcoin mining network. At the time before ASICs and FPGAs started hitting the market in December 2012, the Hash rate of the BTC network was at 26 TeraHASH’s in mostly GPU and CPU power. Based on a rough comparison 12.7 PetaFLOP = 1 TeraHASH the potential computational power that could be added to FAH is:

 

26 TeraHASH 12.7 PetaFLOPS = 330 PetaFLOPS.

 

Imagine if that power was harnessed for molecular protein folding. Most of this power was redirected to altcoin mining after the SHA ASICs came out, since there was no profit motive for folding.

 

If there is a profit motive to folding, Venture capitalists could see this as an opportunity to invest in the creation of economic sized Anton Supercomputer, which is an ASIC molecular protein simulating machine that can fold more efficiently than standard computing hardware. This very thing happened to Bitcoin mining when it became exponentially profitable: venture capitalists invested in the creation of ASIC miners to compute SHA256 at a more efficient rate than standard computing hardware. Currently the Bitcoin network is roughly 4.5 million PetaFLOPS, almost 100,000 times more powerful than FAH.

 

We propose introducing Crypto into FAH

 

FoldingCoin Inc. (built on Counterparty) created an asset with a “Proof of Fold” concept to verify contributed computational power. Participants contribute their cycles to medical research on the Folding@home platform instead of a “Proof of Work” or “Proof of Stake” algorithm on a traditional Altcoin blockchain, and are compensated with crypto currencies.

 

Since Counterparty assets share the Bitcoin blockchain, this allows the legacy mining equipment from Altcoin mining to be redirected towards medical research, since the Bitcoin miners are already covering the security and hashing rate of the Bitcoin blockchain.

 

FoldingCoin has the ability to incorporate multiple coins into the open sourced distribution calculator based on individual missions of the respective coin. With more tokens being added to the FoldingCoin Inc. distribution family, more adaption is gained for Folding@home, FLDC, Counterparty, and the respective token, all at the same time. Tokens added in this way will be advertised as a collaboration effort on FoldingCoin Inc.’s part, but will still be developed and run separately from FoldingCoin Inc. Currently 6 different cryptocurrencies can be earned via FoldingCoin.

 

Once a day, FoldingCoin Inc.’s snapshot code downloads the FAH daily user summary text file and searches line by line to find those folders who have set up their folding software according to the FoldingCoin Inc. instructions:

• Setup a Counterwallet

• Setup FAH (if you already are running FAH, simply set your donor name according to instructions on Step 6)

Even if you do not want the crypto currency, by participating in this project, you will help bring more adoption to FAH from Miners and the general public. When FLDC becomes gains more liquidity in the crypto markets, more participants will join in. And if you do not want the TOKENS on our platform, simply set your donor BTC address to

username_ALL_1BYZjVL5QzD44xhepnvX3D1e2QCDCpP3cV

and the funds will go directly to supporting the FoldingCoin Inc project. Please consider participating in this program to help increase the FAH network to astronomical speeds. The following list will explain what purpose each TOKEN on our platform provides:

• FLDC - This token is distributed daily. We are building an eBay style Marketplace that will allow anyone to buy and sell items with Counterparty Tokens. FLDC will be exclusively used for transaction fees

• TOPFOLDER - This token is distributed once per month. You can exchange this token currently for 1 week of advertising on our website. In the future, we will expand the uses for this token.

• BITCRYSTALS - This token is distributed once per month. You use this token to buy packs of cards for the upcoming game “Spells of Genesis”.

• FDCARD - This token is distributed once per month. This is an exclusive card achieved only via folding for the game “Spells of Genesis”.

• SCOTCOIN - This token is distributed once per month. This token is trying to become the crypto currency of Scotland.

• OCTO - This token is distributed once per month. This token is building applications for online fantasy sports. Octoparty is new, so currently no uses.

• POWC - This token is distributed weekly. This token is trying to become the crypto currency of comic books. Currently being developed so currently no uses.

If anyone has questions or wants more information, please use one of the following sources. You may also post here and I will return with an answer. Thanks and I hope to see you participate!

email: [email protected]

White Paper: Found Here

Website: http://foldingcoin.net

Forum: Bitcointalk

[srbz]

I like the initiative, giving people an incentive to using their computational power for the greater good, rather than just for their own, personal gain. There seems to be kind of an inflation going on with cryptocurrencies after the BTC boom a while back; not in their rates, but in the seemingly endless variations of currencies. Currently cryptocoincharts.info lists 2933 different currencies available. I can't possibly imagine having all these new cryptocurrencies are supposed to be socially beneficial, except perhaps in a few select cases, like this.

 

However, I'm struggling to understand how value is supposed to be generated here. Are you depending on donations in the form of other cryptocurrencies? It sounds a little awkward relying on people donating their computer-generated currency - indirectly donating their computing time - for you to "pay off" yet other people for donating their computing time to folding.

 

I agree with the motive, people should absolutely use their computer power for something that actually matters, rather than wasting it on currency mining, which, in my opinion, is about as socially benificial as stock trade robots. I might just check it out.

[PookTwo]

I like the initiative, giving people an incentive to using their computational power for the greater good, rather than just for their own, personal gain. There seems to be kind of an inflation going on with cryptocurrencies after the BTC boom a while back; not in their rates, but in the seemingly endless variations of currencies. Currently cryptocoincharts.info lists 2933 different currencies available. I can't possibly imagine having all these new cryptocurrencies are supposed to be socially beneficial, except perhaps in a few select cases, like this.

 

However, I'm struggling to understand how value is supposed to be generated here. Are you depending on donations in the form of other cryptocurrencies? It sounds a little awkward relying on people donating their computer-generated currency - indirectly donating their computing time - for you to "pay off" yet other people for donating their computing time to folding.

 

I agree with the motive, people should absolutely use their computer power for something that actually matters, rather than wasting it on currency mining, which, in my opinion, is about as socially benificial as stock trade robots. I might just check it out.

 

Most of the coins will die, you are absolutely correct. There is no possible way for all of them to make it. However, with FAH being the motive for earning this crypto currency, we feel this gives FLDC superior value. And since we will be accepting FLDC for our ebay style marketplace, we feel this will drive demand. Will FLDC beat BTC, no. But it can compliment it very well. In order to eliminate the use of computational power towards the other altcoins though, we need more adoption.

 

As for using the donational address, that is simply if someone likes what we are doing, but doesnt want the crypto itself. I absolutely encourage everyone to keep it for themself. The more people that hold FLDC, the more people will want to fold.