He is not saying leave the security of the network in the hands of a few people. The goal of this coin is to try and allow people to mine without making one technology way bigger than another one - for example make it so that people with Asics can mine but people with Asics don't control the whole network like for Bitcoin.
Therefore he is just saying people who want to mine curecoin can mine with Asics and there mining power will be used for securing the network - like they do with Bitcoin - and in exchange for that they get 20% of the coins.
The POW - if you mean using only Asics or something to mine FAH is impossible because Asics don't work with FAH. I'm confused what you mean by if this POW can't be used to fold proteins directly - you do fold proteins but if people just folded proteins the network wouldn't be secure and transactions wouldn't be managed making it not a coin so Asics are used in that respect.
I mean use an algorithm to fold proteins as PoW, like primecoin and riecoin did to find prime chains, but by this way we couldn't use f@h workunits and the results wouldn't be as usefull as f@h works, I think that something similar to robetta 3d protein modeling could be achievable "I'm not a coder or mathematician, only a student and far from brilliant... so maybe this is much much hard that I imagine"
So which I say is that the network could easily become screwed by a few asics owners... and I don't expect a high volume of newer asics mining this coin which only will give them 20% and doubt this could be more profitable than btc mining.
Like I said, is that this idea could be implemented over nxt "similar to nodecoin, look into it" and get rid off from all the asics and have a secured blockchain without them. (I know there are many nxt haters... but a good idea is a good idea...) so please, take a look into it and if it isn't viable, explain me your point and allow me to sleep soundly
The problem I see with your suggestion of the algorithm is that it hurts the effectiveness of the science behind it. Theoretically an algorithm could be written that could fold protein by itself so we wouldn't use f@h but still fold proteins however there are 3 problems with this.
1) F@H has been working on what they have been doing for 10 or more years and they have a very nice system in place for validation and all of that. Plus there points system runs off of comparing what your machine can do compared to a test system which results in increased costs for the curecoin devs who will need to set this up. Getting a validated system is quite hard but you would need a near perfect one in place before you started otherwise people could cheat the system by submitting invalid units - a problem that F@H has experienced a few times in the past I believe. Also I believe F@H is not fully open source - because people could exploit the code and use it to submit invalid work units so this code would need to be written from scratch.
2) The folding of random problems by itself would be useless - we would need a list of what proteins to fold and these are normally developed in Stanford laboratories and then submitted to the network. The cost in research time and equipment to determine what proteins to fold is probably close to if not in the millions of dollars something which I doubt the developers can afford. However, without this step done beforehand it would not be possible to start the coin.
3) The whole point of F@H is to get protein results which are then taken back to the lab and tested out to confirm how useful they are - the computing portion is done to lower the number of possible choices because testing every possible combination would take forever and not be effective. As a result more work would need to be done in order to do the actual science or the protein folding is again useless.
And what you said about the Asics I disagree - I think the network will manage itself. 20% of the coins is still a decent amount and I think it would attract Asics from people who have Asics that are no longer effective for Bitcoin mining (such as first generation Bitcoin Asics from Avalon or Butterfly labs). A lot of these people will/can turn to Bitcoin and then the profitability of the network will manage itself.
I understand that the network could become screwed by a few Asic miners but I also believe that as the coin will attract enough Asic miners to keep it secure.
I like your idea of removing the Asics from the equation and sticking with a F@H algorithm but I believe that the time (years) and the money (close to millions) would probably take so much time that it is not worth it and probably very difficult to get backing for.
Also to address your question about the primes the reason they are able to do it is because the prime computing doesn't really build off any outside research and the code for how to calculate prime numbers on a laptop is pretty widely available so you just need to modify it some - it is a much simpler calculation and it is a lot easier to confirm whether or not someone has submitted a valid answer.
Hope this helped - I don't know it all perfectly but that is based of my knowledge and research someone else on the project probably has more to add/update with this.
Thanks,
Cameron