On 10 April 2018 at 22:45, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
The Foundation has been accepting BitCoin donations. Unfortunately, BitCoin is very wasteful in terms of electricity, and is therefore a dirty cryptocurrency.
They all are. The only difference is that bitcoin is Asic mined so doesn't directly drive up the price of graphics cards.
I recommend that the Foundation immediately cease accepting BitCoin, and require donors who wish to donate in cryptocurrency to convert to FoldingCoin instead. Please see: FoldingCoin (FLDC)
FoldingCoin is the one where you give fake results to Folding@home (since the maths is NP hard there is no real time way to check if your results are real or not) in return for tokens that have little in the way of actual value.
This conversion will place the Foundation at the forefront of cryptocurrency technology,
The forefront of cryptocurrency technology is coming up with new and exciting ways to scam people. The Foundation should not be getting involved.
As other cryptocurrencies based on proofs of useful work instead of useless work emerge,
Is gaming a Proof-of-Research useful? Because if so Gridcoin exist. In theory burstcoin could be used to provide archival storage although there are a bunch of ways of doing that without driving up hard disc prices.
the Foundation should consider those. FoldingCoin is based on proofs of useful prediction of protein folding,
No it isn't. The problem is it is based off the old folding@home which works on the basis that most people aren't trying to scam the system. If FoldingCoin ever became popular that would no longer be the case at which point it becomes proof of results given to results to Folding@home with no requirement that those results be real.