HN user
But this has two issues if i am reading this right:
1. Since only Gridcoin has the information of the users, than what is to prevent them from creating fake accounts that they themselves hold and paying themselves more Gridcoins?
2. Unless if every single donor has an encrypted Comodo (or something similar) email with Gridcoin, then emails can be stolen. And if gridcoin becomes valuable enough and emails are not encrypted, then its a sure thing that they will be stolen.
I disagree. I think that Counterparty adds value to the Bitcoin platform. I envision BTC almost being like gold, not something that will ultimately be used everyday. I think a token built inside of Counterparty will be that everyday used token.
Its kind of like the internet, the original value of the internet was to transfer files from point A to point B. Then came: email, the browser, instant messaging, online shopping, social media, streaming, ext.....
This adds additional value to the Bitcoin blockchain thus making it more desirable to have.
But i do agree that the miners should work on useless algorithms, that is the best way to keep it just and fair, but building applications inside of that is just fantastic
Fair enough, i did not know that, and i do love Gridcoin as they are supporting a different platform than us. I wish them the best of luck, though i do think they should move over to Counterparty rather than a new POS blockchain they have been creating.
But with FLDC, you can have both :) The ASIC miners for Bitcoin cannot fold proteins, we are trying to bring in the Altcoin miners still using CPU and GPUS
Actually non of the money goes towards protein folding, its the power of the folders that does. All of the FLDC (money) goes directly to those that fold.
As for the IPO, we dont need one. Since a counterparty asset is very easy to create, our overhead is low. Thats why we are running a fundraiser, we plan on implementing additional features, but really no features are required to distribute FLDC. The features will help better the currency and the economy surrounding the currency, but unless people wish to give us money to do these things, then we will simply keep coding ourselves and distribute FLDC everyday.
Other blockchains require a lot of maintenance and patches, we do not. Almost no overhead
The miners are there because Counterparty assets are built inside of the bitcoin blockchain. So without the miners hashing the blockchain, the transactions for CP assets (FLDC) will not go through.
As for why not just donate to standford? You absolutely could and i am sure they would love that :) But we are trying to harness the 330 PetaFLOPS of CPU and GPU computational power used in the other altcoins. So by giving an incentive to fold to the miners, the hopes are they will move over to folding, rather than hashing at blockchains that in many cases die off or get abandoned.
Where there is profit there is competition. As a miner years ago, i was able to produce a lot of bitcoins with my GPU setup. When the ASICs came out i tried to compete, but simply did not have the capital. But other people did. And it wasnt just one person, it was a few big companies that did this.
So no longer is the individual able to mine BTC, its now a profession. So if this happened to FLDC, that wouldnt really be a bad thing, because if it is to happen, then that would mean FLDC has gained enough value for someone to pour money into being the top folder. So then the economy of FLDC would be where the general public has the interest and the Folders would simply be a profession.
if you are a certified medical researcher you can request to review the WUs. Many might not produce real results, but in the words of thomas edison:
I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
Heres a good analogy:
Visa and the banks are the old way of doing things, they are analog. Blockchain technology and Bitcoin are digital.
Years ago when analog signals had no longer been useful and became outdated, it became a law that all signal for television must be broadcast in digital. This was because analog required so much more energy and bandwidth then digital does.
What bitcoin offers is a replacement for all the energy and resources that are poured into money transmitters, banks, credit cards, and even recently wall street. The technology is expensive to run, but not more expensive than all of the above combined.
And to answer the question of transactions per second, the Bitcoin network is endless. The problem isnt how many transactions can you do, the problem is storage. The blockchain currently is 25 GBs of data that must be stored by many nodes. Though not everyone has to have a nod, if many do not and only big companies do, then it can become once again centralized. Even though 25 GBs is not that much, that is with only around 100-200,000 transactions a day in the BTC network. Visa does 2,000 a second alone.
So if the blockchain was to transact 2,000 a second, you are looking at PB hard drives in a year or so. That is the issue to be concerned with. here is a great article for reading on possibly solutions / problems https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability
We love gridcoin as they are a different platform. Being able to payout the same crypto for BOINC and FAH would be hard because the credits values are different.
You simply could not say half the Gridcoins go to BOINC and half go to FAH because what if there are more users on FAH in compared to BOINC?
Also POS has its issues like POW does: if someone controls half of the currency, then they could attack the network. At this point.. it would be very easy for somone with a couple thousands of dollars to buy half of the Gridcoin out there and perform the attack, its very expensive to buy half of the BTC mining hashrate.
BOINC has not released this system yet, it is still in the works and i look forward to seeing how it would work. Even though FLDC is centralized to an extent, every possibly solution dealing with BOINC and FAH has centralization leaks, just different degrees.
Also with BOINC, anyone can create a project to work on. Someone could potentially create a cron job application masked as lets say a protein folding aplication to harness BOINC power for not only A. Gridcoins but B. computational power used for something malicous like cracking email passwords. This bad actor would then gain two benefits.
Though after awhile BOINC may discover this and remove them, the possability for even a days worth of work could be problematic. Dont get me wrong, I love BOINC, but for this system to work, they would need to have an approved list of specific projects one could work on to receive Gridcoin.
We actually just had a double spend try and happen to us. I cannot show you the links, because the blockchain already ignored them.
What happened was:
We run a fundraiser for helping in the expansion of foldingcoin http://foldingcoin.net/fundraising/ and we use a company called Vennd.io to help in this fundraiser.
What happens is someone will send BTC to a certain address, and in return they are given an amount of 1 FLDC per every 0.00001 BTC they donated. Someone recently tried to double spend a BTC transaction to trick Counterparty into giving them double the FLDC in return for their BTC. However since the double BTC was denied, so was the double FLDC.
I tweeted about it, but its no longer in the blockchain, here is the tweet https://twitter.com/FoldingCoin/status/558704804449771520 when it was solved, and here was the first tweet about the actual transaction https://twitter.com/FoldingCoin/status/558073025468567553
Under the assumption that protein folding does get solved, we will simply transfer to the next humanitarian distributed computing platform out there.
We would not even have to decide what this is, we could leave it up to the holders of FLDC. We have a voting system (something that a traditional Altcoin cannot do) that allows us to distribute vote tokens to FLDC holders. http://foldingcoin.net/fldc-voting/
I hope protein folds fun out, then we would understand damn near everything about the human body, then i guess my next vote would be to help SETI and discover the aliens :D
We do not want this to be your everyday "buy and sell coin", as you can see on https://www.poloniex.com/exchange#btc_fldc when we arrived there, we had high value, but like all other altcoins, our value dropped.
This is the nature of the altcoins.
However, we are working on 2 projects that will give this token value:
1. Creating this as a Meetup currency 2. Creating a ebay type martketplace for this coin (and any counterparty token) to be used to buy and sell goods
We are releasing our white paper by Feb 5th and it will go into great detail on how we will accomplish this, but basically since we do not have to create our own QR scans, transaction system, blockchain, ext... we can simply input the open source Counterparty features to create a decentralized Meetup currency and marketplace.
I know that is not a lot of information, but please give me until the 5th to post the white paper here. At this point, i do not expect the non crypto communities to fully understand what we are trying to do, but this is a very appealing coin to those that mine for whatever personal reasons they have to mine.
Well said. A lot of my time in forums is spent explaining the benefits of Counterparty. It is a fantastic platform that allows anyone with any skill set to create an altcoin, known as an asset or token in the CP world.
This is great because it allows our development team to work on features, rather than a blockchain and wallet system that can be very hard for a small team of 5 to maintain. Please read this page if you havent already about the pros and cons of Counterparty http://foldingcoin.net/fldc-vs-alts/
Your right, the currency directly does not do anything, but in the crypto currency space people love the altcions. There are arguments for both sides on the value and the need for altcoins but the fact remains that people mine them.
The way our coin helps is by convincing the mass amount of computational power that is dumped into altcoins that will eventually fade away, or become scam coins, to be better used towards something that will benefit the world.
The BTC miners i do not believe waste energy as they are providing a fantastic transaction ledger.
Ah yes the ANTON :) We would love for this to become readily available to the public. However it is expensive at this point. But I love this source and will be calling this company very soon, thank you.
Here is how we invision the ANTON could become readily available for purchase:
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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AFLOPS#Bitcoin_.22FLOPS.2... . The FAH grid computing network has 46 PetaFLOPS and is known as the world's most powerful computing network outside of the Bitcoin mining network.
Now 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. FoldingCoin looks to bring a profit motive for people to fold proteins by distributing FLDC along with other Counterparty tokens.
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.
I do agree that many altcoins are "pump and dump", as i have been a miner for years now. But also a lot of these altcoins never became incorporated and masked their identities, IPs, ext... We are fully open with who we are, with pictures to our names and we are 100% compliant with US laws, we are a registered non profit with my name and information on their.
That being said, we are held accountable for our actions as many other altcoins are not, which is how they get away with scamming people.
Even if we do fail in the future, we have at least brought the idea of Folding to many miners who had never heard of it before. Look at our team, http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_summary.php?s=&t... but since we allow other team members to earn FLDC, we just hit 21 million FAH credits yesterday making us the 6th fastest FAH team in the program. That is an accomplishment in itself :)
Real quick, this forum does not allow me to post a lot of responses, so I encourage everyone to email me rross@foldingcoin.net or join in the discussion here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=781352.0 but i will still answer as often as this forum allows me to per day :)
The miners are there for a reason. Looking at the Counterparty protocol you will see that since the CP assets live inside the individual BTC transactions, that unless the miners verify the transaction to be accepted, then the assets will work in the same way that BTC does and not go through.
The hashing function is the Bitcoin network. FLDC is simply in 140 bytes of data inside a BTC transaction. Thats why we chose to go with Counterparty, all computational power that users donate to the FAH program goes 100% in the project, and the existing miners for BTC are the ones who hash FLDC
The counterparty protocol is built inside of the Bitcoin network. All assets (including FLDC) are built on this platform. It houses the assets inside of the Bitcoin network by using the 140 bytes of unused data in every BTC transaction. So everytime you send or receive FLDC, you will notice it shows up in the blockchain as a 0.00006 BTC transaction. This actually represents the Counterparty asset. http://blockscan.com/ is a site that decrypts this information and displays it as the assets, blockchain.info will only see it as a BTC transaction.
So this prevents the double spend, because Counterparty is secured by the BTC miners, so the hashing power of the BTC miners is the same as the Counterparty assets. Only an attack on the Bitcoin network would affect FLDC
Please read here http://foldingcoin.net/alttokens/ for a complete detail on the benefits of adding crypto currency to FAH. Also you can watch this 26 minute video (i still have to edit, but the information is there https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adROavBst7E and it goes into grave detail on the benefits
An attacker could alter the amount of points that they receive. It has happened in the past with Folding@home, but they have put measures in place to prevent this from happening again. Although it isnt a guarantee that someone will not find a work around, we would become instantly aware and a patch could be put in place to correct the problem. https://folding.stanford.edu/home/faq/faq-points/#ntoc3
Each core is digitally signed for security reasons and authenticity of a real WU http://folding.stanford.edu/home/faq/#ntoc45
Hello, this is Robert with FoldingCoin :) I love that this discussion is here and I am replying to these comments right now.
There is no way of decentralizing with the Counterparty platform. I encourage everyone to read all of the great features that you get by being on Counterparty in the same link provided by @mrb. We feel also including the downsides is crucial to have a better understanding of what we are trying to accomplish.
Though we have measures in place to deal with the centralization issue we currently have:
1. We are incorporated as a Non profit in Indiana and we report to the government. We are 100% transparent about everything that we do. If we are to have malicious intentions, then we would be held accountable against the government.
2. We are setting up a board of directors to control the undistributed FLDC that we currently hold. This probably will not become a reality until the end of the year, but we are working on it. The first step was to become an official non profit found here https://secure.in.gov/sos/online_corps/name_search_results.a...