Topic: [ANN] CureCoin to be released soon. - page 2. (Read 36665 times)

You raise a very interesting and possible crucial point, deserving serious consideration.

But the examples referred to, monetary incitements for book-reading and recruiting for social networks, are not directly applicable. The main difference is a cross-fertilization between the use of CureCoin as a currency and its intended mode of distribution. That is: A third party, the common non-mining (or folding..) user is more inclined to use CureCoin specifically due to it being distributed through donated computer power for medial research, than e.g. Bitcoin and all its current mining-distributed spin-offs.

I can't see any such effect with the examples referred to; there is not an obvious aspect of the incentive scheme itself being a positive, lasting feature. So not only are CureCoin folders getting rich knowing they do charitable work with their GPU's, they can even feel better about the process of parting with their mined CureCoin as this positive aspect should also be in effect indirectly for any 3. party user.

CryptoCoins can in the respect of mode of distribution be considered having different smells. This comparison is absolutely in the favor of CureCoin - is smells of Roses, where 100% blockchain mined Bitcoin/Litecoin/etc. smells of nerd BO (overheated mining rigs) in damp  basement dwellings (now I'm harsh...)

All in all, I would prefer to be doing something useful while I am being greedy.

I'm just an average Jane possessed of an average amount of avarice, but also an average amount of abhorrence to waste and maybe more than a smidge of altruism.  I like convenience, but I also do that little bit extra to separate out my recycling - and I live somewhere where standard garbage collection happens 3x/week with no meaningful limits, and recycling every other week.  I think there are a lot of people like me, good people of not-perfectly-altruistic motives, minting "greedcoins." 

Flies are better caught with honey than with vinegar, and "greedcoin" is a fairly vinegary thing to say, regardless of its truth.

There are other truths.  Bitsalame is absolutely correct that a multidisciplinary approach be taken to designing and deploying any rewards.  He is dead right about what the research shows about incentivising altruism.  He has made that appeal twice now and has done it thoughtfully. I am concerned about the tone taken by the OP in reply.  MarkM, yeah, is being pretty harsh (vinegar...) and I can understand taking a shot back.  But he and others have offered very detailed concerns that deserve equally thoughtful consideration, and if appropriate, rebuttal.

I don't personally believe the OP has greedy or malignant intentions at all.  But I think it's important to convince people of good intentions, and not just rely on the charitable slant of an idea to do the convincing. There have been many scams that appealed to people's better natures, and it's fair to be concerned that this isn't just another one.  MarkM has a valid concern about the latest pump-n-dump.   He makes another interesting suggestion about using Devcoin.  I don't have an opinion about that at this time; I am hoping that someone more knowledgeable chimes in (bearing bitsalame's caveats in mind).

I love the idea of PoW being the charitable product itself, especially if that keeps the work from falling into the wrong (read: private) hands.  It would remove much of the waste of generating coins and securing blockchains.  So long as it doesn't interfere with the important work going on (as bitsalame warns), I would be all in on something like this.

I appreciate this discussion, even (especially?) the parts that go sailing over my head.  I hope it is able to continue. For my part, I will continue my mighty 300-ish Mhs of greedy mining, and hope that better-informed minds than mine will come up with a superior idea.

Well Mark, I think you are unreasonably harsh. The same thing you said can be said to devcoin as well. I don't see too much difference here.

The guy said he had cancer, if that's true I think it's obvious where his motivation comes from for picking up folding. As to centralized minting, we already have devcoin/freicoin being reasonably successful at it, why not another one. Let the market decide the trustworthiness of the central authorities.

The whole folding part is just a publicity stunt to get a new crapcoin off the ground. Smokescreen, smoke and mirrors.

-MarkM-

So the idea is that the current proof of work, hashing, is an otherwise useless activity outside of the scope of Bitcoin, then maybe it should be replaced with something that's useful to society. Get people's transactions confirmed and solve useful work at the same time. I like that idea.

But there are a couple of things I don't understand.

First, why even include hashing at all? Why the split between different kinds of hardware? It seems counter-productive to me. If the system only did a certain kind of activity, say protein folding instead of hashing, then security for the network would come from protein folding. Why is hashing still needed? If the thought is that having only protein folding would exclude certain hardware, well, isn't that exactly the point? To promote protein folding instead of hashing? If people want to hash, they still have Bitcoin itself, or all sorts of other alt-coins. And if someone ever comes up with a protein-folding ASIC, isn't that a mega-win for everyone?

Second, why protein folding and not something more generic? I'm not sure if something more generic even exists, someone mentioned BOINC, but I'm just curious why protein folding specifically was chosen. If it were more generic, you could have something where miners themselves vote with their calculation-power as to which projects they want to support. Simply join the appropriate mining pool and there you go.

You are the perfect example of how much people are missing in an overspecialized world, that is, that you might be a good programmer or at whatever you do, but you miss the fact that the design of a currency must be multidisciplinary. You clearly lack of fundamental economic understanding to even understand the implications of a design of a currency, and I think that you also lack understanding of the psychological impact that a monetary incentive will have on the existing altruistic networks.

Originally I also thought about about using CPU/GPU power in doing something useful as a proof of work, WAY BEFORE you came onboard.
Of course the first projects that came to my mind were brain mapping, protein folding, and other distributed computing projects. But as I told you on page 5 of this thread: there are risks, and there are plenty of case studies that support what experimental psychology has taught us decades ago.

Look, folding@home is already achieving 9 petaflops by themselves, it doesn't really need to be disturbed with your half-baked experimentation. As I stated before, you might harm the project altogether.

I wouldn't have any reservations if you actually created a standalone protein folding project, in that case go ahead and I would wish you the best of the lucks.
BUT if you are going to be linking your experimental cryptocurrency to an already mature and existing IMPORTANT PROJECTS, you may just end up dragging them down along with your project when it fails (either by poor design or by bad implementation or market failure)

Now considering that you use epithets such as "greedcoin" to address the bitcoins, it is clear to me now that you lack of fundamental economical concepts and I would feel terribly uncomfortable with someone handling this project with such a limited understanding of economics, monetary policies, and social psychology. Right now I feel that allowing you to go ahead with curecoins is like allowing a 12 year old kid to connect a science fair project to a nuclear plant.

I am not against the idea of creating actual value with the proof of work, but it must be studied with a multidisciplinary group of capable people.
With the limited interactions you had in the forum unfortunately I see that you are an ideal candidate for being a prisoner of his own prejudices, a victim of the Dunning–Kruger effect, and definitely those failing at critical thinking shouldn't be on top of such projects.

Sorry bud, I say yes to the idea, but no to the execution. Not by you at least.
If you want to experiment, do it by your own and create your own protein folding simulator.
And I don't care if you meet "a" PhD, specialization in academia (and in the sciences, in general) made the left hand to not know what the right one does. You need at least a dozen from every field possible.
And if you go ahead with this, you might do more harm than good.

If you reply to me with an appeal to authority, you definitely are not up to the task.

I think the OP just has the usual lets make another coin bug, and finds curing cancer or whatever a useful propaganda face to put on it.

As has been pointed out already the folding and so on already need some centralisation, so a blockchain is just totally insanely expensive layer of extra crud. (Blockchains are very very expensive to secure.) They can reward people for folding or whatever using simple normal databases, or if you want them to be able to reward folders with cryptocoins they can be donated cryptocoins by anyone who wishes to support them, or if they are creating open source databases of open source folding data and open source cancer-curing drugs and so on they could even get onto the DeVCoin receivers list so they automatically get devcoins, which they can then use to reward people who do folding for them.

As someone also pointed out there is even an incentive problem for miners, they would be better off if they just throw out the folders.

All in all actually financing research, as distinct from finding yet another excuse to create yet another coin, would be best done by using a merged-mined coin so that the miners are securing it with free hashes instead of having to divert hashing power away from bitcoin. So really the best approaches seem to be (1) If the research to be supported is free open source producing free open source results, just use devcoin; (2) If it is to be closed source results, results patented for drug company exploitation etc, then clone devcoin.

Either way miners get to donate FREE hashing power they are already spending on mining bitcoin and, if they choose, also namecoin and groupcoin and ixcoin and i0coin and coiledcoin and geistgeld.

My impression though is the OP is just out to spam out yet another coin, is willing to co-opt people's humanitarian sensibilities to do so, thus will find any excuse to force a whole new coin to be created and to even pointlessly confuse/entangle it with the folding etc to be able to claim it is "unique".

All the research really needs to support it is funds of any kind it can afford to spend to pay people who do folding, and even then only people who do not prefer to donate their computer power to the folding effort but, rather, want some kind of pay for doing it.

Devcoin would work fine for that, or as I said if its to be non open source or non free results or whatever then a simple direct clone of devcoin would work fine or heck the addresses of the labs could be hardcoded even though devcoin's approach is more flexible for adding or removing labs or projects etc to the list of things to support.

Heck a generic charitycoin could be done, to support everything charitable / humanitarian that is not open source thus does not fall into devcoin's bailiwick.

Certainly you should use merged mining, because at least that might offer some slight amelioration of the otherwise insanely expensive securing problem. If you are pretending to do good, wasting resources un-necessarily is just, well, not-good.

I don't even recall though having seen yet any clear contract as to whether the plan is to fund free open source cures for cancer or patented profits for the drug companies types of cures...

-MarkM-

yea i hate to let a few assholes ruin it for the rest, but the few assholes im worried about have enough hashing power to ruin it for all of us, just like every other new coin that comes out, havent you noticed the pattern? step 1 new coin step 2 pump n dump

and i dont call taking the advice of professors over the advice of bitcointalk.org being a baby. i call that a good decision.

Jesus are you new to the internet or something? You're going to let some assholes ruin it for everyone? You're coming off as a big baby right now.

what almost everyone here has failed to take note of..

1)Bitcoin was an experiment... so is this... im not promising miracles.

2) This is something for people who want to donate their gpu / cpu power to help find cures, if you dont like the idea of there being a possible 5% miscalculation  in you share because the system isnt perfect, then you can continue to mine your greedcoins.

3) The main idea behind this is to encourage larger distributed research networks, not to make you rich from a pump n dump.

These things being said, im trusting more in what the professors and doctors are telling me and not the bitcoin junkies. ill be going with the recommendation of professors and doctors as for launch method.

This WILL NOT BE designed to make bitcoin junkies money ( although, bitcoin was just an experiment, cant say it enough because you have all seem to forgotten that )

This WILL contribute to research networks, possibly making the world a better place to live.

If you cant understand the driving idea is to promote research, and not to make money, then your greed has surely passed you good will.

When the project is ready bitcointalk.org will probably not be included, universities will put it to much better use then a world of self admitted scammers. If you want to prove your dedication to actually helping the world instead of wasting electricity, please join my folding team and starts getting points, as the beta launch (CDCCoin) will be tested only by a small group of students and my folding team as well.

Enter, Bitcointalk FLAME MODE ... please show your frustration in the following blank space. Ill be communicating with a slightly more helpful, peaceful, and honest group of people getting together that actually see through the bitcoin trash talk and see that im trying to do something useful. Ill be done here on bitcointalk as soon as i know my folding team knows were to go to contact me.

And to think i was almost naive enough to release curecoin here... maybe the next time someone comes up with something like this you wont spend so much time crying scam. you can cry scam till your ass bleeds if it makes you feel better. but its a system to encourage research. not really sure how thats a scam.

Cheers

Yea well, we'll see what happens upon release, probably pump and dump... by the way, eta on the release...

I just thought I'd test if OP simply had poor English skills.

I was excited to see this kind of development since I have contributed to these projects for free. It didn't cross my mind that there could be risks to the projects but I tend to agree with bitsalame. Its great he pointed out what surprising results there could be.

OP ignored all my questions in the thread.

Seems a contradiction here.

I`ll tell you what`s the cure for cancer and other stuff that bothers humanity today, and I quote "You are what you eat" . Already billions of dollars have been thrown at the situation for decades and nothing; do you thing Big Pharma is there to make you better!? Think again ...  

You're pretending like CureCoin is anything but a half-baked and poorly-thought-through idea that borders on scam territory. I don't think the OP has any idea about your questions. None of the idea, as written in the first post, makes any sense.

Will this centralization only extend to the provisioning of the work units, or will the management of accounts and balances also be centralized? How are the rewards for folding handled from a technical perspective? Is it simply one private key held by whoever controls the folding that has the ability to inject an arbitrary amount of coins into the system as a reward? Will there be a trust-fee way for users to verify from a global perspective that coins are only being rewarded specifically for folding and not simply being created out of thin air?


What incentive is there for hashers to not just eventually kick the folders out of the blockchain? They don't do anything to secure it but do take away rewards that could go to the hashers. It sounds like you have an incentive problem.

Since the system is already fairly centralized, do you even need a blockchain?


Assuming the system is opened up to general distributed computation, will anybody be able to send out work units to be used for generating CureCoins or will you have to register with a centralized entity to do so? How do you intend on keeping the varied participants in this scheme honest?


What I was asking is how many CureCoins will there be, and how quickly will they be generated?

I am sure this was asked, but...

When about is this going to be launched? I don't need exact time, but maybe weeks, months?

BOINC = open source

F@H = closed client



Also, this^^^