How does FoldingCoin differ from CureCoin which, AIUI, does the same folding@home calculations?
Both Foldingcoin and Curecoin do folding using Folding@Home. The difference is that Curecoin has its own blockchain which must be secured by mining the coins, expending extra energy. As I understand it, Curecoin uses both SHA256 mining (proof of work) as well as Proof of stake minting. So for Curecoin, people use CPU and GPU power for actually running folding@home, and there are also miners securing their blockchain expending energy. See more about Curecoin at
https://www.curecoin.net. Foldingcoin, on the other hand, is a Counterparty asset. Counterparty runs on top of the bitcoin blockchain, thus we save ourselves from having to spend developer time in maintaining a separate Foldingcoin blockchain, as well as saving unnecessary energy expenditures by letting the bitcoin blockchain secure the FLDC token. For an impartial look at the pros and cons of using Counterparty, see
http://foldingcoin.net/the-coin/fldc-vs-alts/Another difference is that the Foldingcoin project, besides rewarding participating folders with FLDC, also promotes merged folding distributions of various other counterparty assets. In the past, one of these (among others) has been the highly successful Scotcoin project, and there is still an ongoing collaboration with Spells of Genesis (SoG), an upcoming video game innovating the gaming space with blockchain based trading cards. Merged folding participants have received the exclusive FDCARD (the first blockchain card issued by SoG), as well as the game currency Bitcrystals and MAGICFLDC, another special SoG token which is valuable to trade for other game assets. Find out more about SoG merged folding here:
http://foldingcoin.net/portfolio/spells-of-genesis/ The Foldingcoin team is actively pursuing more collaboration opportunities with new projects for future merged folding distributions. Stay tuned for the news!
But there´s more! You don´t actually have to choose between Curecoin and Foldingcoin. In fact, you can receive both of these coins for your efforts participating at Folding@Home. You just need to use the same username conforming with the Foldingcoin standards (i.e. username_ALL_bitcoinaddress) to also register for the Curecoin folding pool, and use the Curecoin Team number when setting up your FAH client. You can find tutorials on setting up Foldingcoin here:
http://foldingcoin.net/resources/video-tutorials/