Topic: PRE [ANN] CureCoin development continues.... - page 12. (Read 94919 times)

can i mine this already?

It all looks interesting.
I might put this one in my pool @ luckyminers.com

You have to create a super-folder, a Folding@Home Pool miner. If you make a massive simulation and someone is pumping in fake values they will get caught immediately, we could do it in quadrants maybe sections of a massive (n x n x n)n simulation with each node in the chain being a part of the larger simulation, bad values would not match. maybe even partition the jobs into threads so that each node is processing multiple projects at once? This would create multiple faulty computations appear on the larger grid, pinpointing nodes with failing GPUs or CPUs maybe even FPGA chips so that they can be re-assigned at the first sign of trouble.

I have a few ideas on how we could create a massive Hadoop cluster with Machine learning algorithms to properly connect everyone on the grid. Hell with this setup even the proximity of faulty or malicious nodes can be spotted by simply noticing if they are a botnet with multiple failing nodes or a deliberate attack, the machine wouldn't have to figure it out, it would just disconnect them from the grid.

The more Vectors we have to spot a faulty computation the better.

(n x n x n)n Grid to overlap computations.

Partitioned computations so no single node gets a single job, further dividing the possibility of damaging a major part of a computation.
Further partitioning through time as well can make the system more robust, you get to only complete a set size of a computation before you are handed a new one... further complexifying this Rubick's Cube. The system optimizations have to be automated.

Adding Machine Learning Algorithms to Data Mine all the connections for Performance data; This data will be important, it tells the system what a normal working system looks like, deviations are suspect and will be investigated with additional MLAs. This will be useful to analyze Folding Algorithms, Network Connections and how to route nodes for fastest performance, even further analysis metrics that can be open sourced so that anyone can view the metrics of the Grid to add that Human Intelligence component, we are masters at pattern recognition why not integrate it into it's working; The Machine will learn from us on how to best operate the network, by simply adding suggestions and giving the Network time to analyze controlled changes in it's parameters... a massive crowd sourced control room, maybe even a way for people to learn how the science of folding works so they can spot bad computations? The two systems would be separate, but the system could also be helped to compute the results to see if crowd sourced suggestions would have helped it deal with it's network problems for future use.

I believe in using every ounce of intelligence we can, and that requires a little more than computers, Each processor is suited to different computations just have to build it in a way that is accessible to all the architectures, even our own.

The back end for the points can be tied in directly with the Open Transactions Library for security of the point system, it would be tamper proof, all nodes would be servers for the points network, making any change would still require the concensus of everyone but without a massive blockchain. It could be implemented by writing a proper OT contract on how points are to be handled per computation and simply automate the dissemination directly from the OT server federation... the contract would be impossible to tamper with.

The contract made would give authority of the points calculated for a set time for the network to do the Data Mining, once done making sure everything is normal, it releases the points automatically.

Any further action if the calculation is proven to be faulty at a later time, we can give them a demerit point and work under the philosophy of, "Fool me once, shame on you! Fool me twice, shame on me."

A lot of the system could be directly accessible from the web if we convert it to JavaScript, a special subset asm.js, to deploy it across the web for all processing devices, so that even a cell phone can donate it's metric data for science.

here is an example so you can be amazed... all this is JavaScript. You will need Firefoxhttp://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

Epic Citadel: Unreal Engine 3 Port to asm.js
http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/

BananaBread playable demo.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/demos/detail/bananabread

Monster Madness game: Zombie asm.js port, test servers won't be back till january , so bookmark it for later.
http://www.monstermadness.com/

OpenRisc emulator with Internet access... it's old so use the console.
http://s-macke.github.io/jor1k/

and more demos.
https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki

How hard could it be to implement all the security and folding at home software into a browser for instant access? We can even make it fully opensource so that it gets the input of thousands of dedicated volunteers, they will make the code unbreakable, if they can't break it by knowing how it's built, then no one can and when it's ready it will released for everyone to try to break, before integrating it permanently.

 

I haven't donated but I have invested some of my computer's time into solving solutions. I am also interested in reading the discussion though because it lets me know how close to releasing curecoin the team actually is and what problems are left to be solved because it is released.

However, I'm interested about the cheating on points thing yet because I know some people take points seriously, even if they have no monetary value, and companies like EVGA give you some credit every month for the points you get towards buying a GPU, so the points have a little bit of monetary value their. I've never seen anyone be able to cheat on their points nor seen anyone do it now when Franko's are being given away and their is some monetary value attached. Do you have an explanation for how this would be possible or if anyone has ever done this.

As a donator/investor I'd be happy to be able to read the discussion about solutions to these issues here, and I'm sure everyone else who donated/invested would be too.

We want curecoin!
Get it figured out and get it out asap!
I love F@H and I love crypto. Make it work!

I am a contractor.  I've been developing software for Folding@home for the last 5 years.  Vijay Pande is the leader of F@H and I asked his permission before making comments here.


Part of the point is that we would like to make it publicly clear that we are not yet endorsing CureCoin and are concerned about the points I raised earlier.  I think it would be better to continue the discussion here.

Have you all considered ProtoShare as a method of crowd funding (think p2p crowd sourcing like kickstarter).  They seem to be gaining traction in the decentralized autonomous community sector, and I think an idea of your magnitude would receive lots of attention!  You guys are running an incredibly noble cause, and a lot of us respect this project!


Is there any way you could use the Proof of Work system to have "miners" validate any results returned from nodes on F@H network?  After the work is done, is there a way to submit that work to the blockchain for verification?  And any fraudulent results would incur non payment to the party who submitted.  It would also mean 51% of the miners would have to agree on the fraudulent submission for it to be accepted.  Maybe in that way you could separate the important work of the nodes (solving real world problems to benefit humanity) from the verification system which is still rewarded for its purpose.  I don't know enough about folding at home to know if this would work, just a thought.

Joe C needs to clarify his involvement with FAH. He is outsourced by FAH to work on the client, and does not represent FAH. He runs his own company, and gets paid by FAH to make updates to the client. In fact I do believe Joe C might be getting an email from FAH for making these statements.  

What are you talking about? Did you miss the post a page ago where one of the lead devs told you that their security was insufficient when dealing with valueless points, much less valuable coins? Why anyone would think longtime folders a valuable source next to that is baffling.

The security of the FAH network will not credit anyone that attempts to cheat. The amount of people with the know how to "possibly cheat" FAH's current security I'm sure is rather small. It will be a waste of their efforts. There have been a lot of claims that the system is cheat-able, however I have yet to see anyone suggest something that would actually make it through FAH security. Some of these claims might have worked a long time ago before FAH security was greatly increased.

Cheating will be a problem when points or coins are worth $$$.

Id like to make a correction here. The verification of the WU results will still be handled by the original FAH client, and also by the FAH servers, CureCoin in no way will be creating our own folding client. So all the security currently in place will still be there. There is no need to over complicate the process as many people are suggesting we do.

Also, to address the cheating issue, Ive been told by long term FAH members that the FAH security has one of the best track records for security of all DCN's. By implying there system is easily cheated goes against what others are telling me that have been with FAH since the start. Even if someone like myself, or yourself, or anyone else were to try to modify the client the FAH servers would reject the false WU's. If you know of any vulnerability in the client you are working on then I would suggest you speak to the ones who run the FAH server, to see if this possible imperfection is even valid.  

Lets not over complicate this process, please read over my forum and ask me directly in a message  on my own forum ( http://curecoin.us ) or in an email rather then asking the community for answers. Please sign up at my forum and contact me with your email address. We can speed up the process of getting you the information you're looking for.

Im sure you will agree "there is much less work to be done before this is all resolved" when you have the proper information.

All of your ideas are valid, but there has been enough "suggestions" to changes to my current system to write a novel from.  Please dont take offense, its merely a misunderstanding.

One of your points has been addressed.  "Make the CureCoin software automatically issue coins to the addresses by included the signed certificates in to the block chain." has already been resolved. Please dont make accusations if you have not done enough reading to be sure of your statements. Lets please get these ideas communicated  without making a scene and getting everyone confused. The confusion runs deep enough as it is.

The 10% dev budget is broken down into smaller section to do important things like cover server costs, security, and a wide range of items. Again, please read my forum before making the same assumptions that everyone else does. I already sent a draft of the dev budget to Prof Vijay, why have you not seen it yet? The dev budget includes %'s to cover FAH expenses, which could even include work done on the folding client, which means you are essentially already in the budget, and work you do for FAH can be compensated in the form of Curecoin.

Im trying my best to bring together the crypto community and the folding community without ruffling too many feathers. Its been an interesting process and both sides are learning from each other. You are a little "late on the scene" as you mentioned. I know the forum posts here are very long and some info is irrelevant and hard to sort through.

@Vorksholk, thank you for addressing my questions.  There's much work to be done before this is all resolved.

This is something we have considered.  The major problem with this is that the results run even on exactly the same hardware are never the same.  This is a common problem with floating point calculations.  Multi-threaded computation on both CPUs and GPUs can also introduce random variations in the results.  Small variations propagate very quickly in an MD simulation.  This makes it impossible to verify results in the way you are suggesting with out drastically changing what we are doing.

Even if F@H's points system were made secure trusting both Stanford and CureCoin with 55% of the proceeds seems a lot to ask of holders of the currency.  Even if you and I are incorruptible others in either organization may not be.  Remember this includes not just current members of both organizations but also future members.

Here is one possible way to alleviate some of the uncertainty:

• Have the Folding@home software generate CureCoin addresses for all F@H contributors.
• Submit the CureCoin address with all work results.
• Have Stanford servers issue cryptographically signed certificates containing the number of points and the CureCoin address.
• Make the CureCoin software automatically issue coins to the addresses by included the signed certificates in to the block chain.

I wonder if it would not also be simpler to issue a new coin for each special cause.  E.g. one for F@H, one for BOINC, etc.  This way there would be no ambiguity about how coins will be distributed in the future.  Coins for different causes could be traded on exchanges.

This is my 3rd attempt to communicate with you joe, bitcointalk seems to be getting a ddos and will not submit my log winded responses.

Joe is an honor to have on this discussion he is responsible for the latest FAH client updates and contributed to the core17 development.

Please join my forum at http://curecoin.us and message me there. I have the answers to your questions, but the BTC forum is not playing nice with me at the moment.... It already erased 2 posts in which I tried to answer all your questions.

Hey jcoffland!

There are certainly a few issues we have yet to address:

It appears you are referring to your system and people's ability to falsify reported data and get credited points, correct? This has been one of the main issues, probably the largest, that have impeded the release of CureCoin. Other things that have impeded the release have mostly been new ideas and services/programs to have available at or near launch. However, for dealing with cheating on F@H submissions, we don't truly have a way to prevent against this, as we don't have access to Folding@Home's servers, work validation, etc. Our hope is that we can work with Stanford to find a way to improve work validity checks, perhaps for simply having a system that double-checks work by giving the same work unit out to two different people, and makes sure that the submitted results match. If they don't, it would be sent to a third. We understand that the F@H project needs work units submitted back quickly to create the next batch of work (from what I presume to be a genetic algorithm for taking the best/most promising results and creating new test scenarios based off of those 'parents', please correct me if this is wrong), which may cause this duplicity/redundancy to be a problem. However, if the workunit was returned, it could be used in the next pool of workunits, and then if upon checking (other people send in different results for that job) the workunit is found to be forged, the effect that that incorrect data has on the next generation of tests should be fairly small, and that person would be awarded no points, so there would be no incentive for someone to submit false work results.

The other problem that this duplicity brings up is that suddenly your computational power from the CureCoin team is cut in half, which would be unfortunate. There may be a better way to perhaps only duplicate results of a, say, sixth of the workunits, and if a person was found to have above a certain threshold of invalid results they are banned, their points are wiped, etc. This way, you would only lose around 14% of the computational power, but would still make cheating very difficult. Perhaps only award points once an account crosses 10 submitted valid workunits (and when they cross that threshold they get full points for all of those Work Units automatically). In this case, a person would be very unlikely to have 10 forged workunits pass the filter, and if they were to do the first 10 workunits correctly their incorrect work would quickly be revealed and they would waste a lot of time doing correct units only to not get a payout. If we utilized some form of PPLNWU (Pay Per Last N Work Units) similar to the PPLNS system cryptocurrency pools use normally, people wouldn't get much of a payout until say 20 or 30 workunits in...

Either way, this solution still has a way to come, and most likely will require Stanford to implement something on their end for the CureCoin team, we would love to help and get Stanford's input on this issue.

Why do the CureCoin devs get 10%?
This seems to be a common issue people raise with the coin, unfortunately. Not only is the 10% not set in stone, but the 10% is a Dev Fund, not funds for Devs
We plan to use the majority of dev funds for giving away folding hardware, purchasing infrastructure (for ourselves, and for Stanford), hiring freelance programming/design/advertising talent, donating to charities, etc. While some of it will, certainly, go to core developers, this amount is much smaller. As far as I know, part of that 10% is for Stanford for hardware, bandwidth, etc. Most of the donation money we receive is either being held for an in-case-of-emergency or being spent on development costs, such as purchasing servers, etc. Some may be put towards community events, some may be put towards folding hardware.

The bigger question: Do we have to trust CureCoin to fairly deal out the 45% share to computational contributors?
Yes, there is a level of trust involved, certainly. However, it's important to note that we will not be holding that 45% (we were throwing around ideas, perhaps Stanford could hold the 45% and just send the amount we need week to week or even on a daily basis to the wallet for the payouts for the folding pool). We are planning to determine which other projects are worthwhile through a semi-democratic structure. Most likely (though again this isn't set in stone!) we will choose the projects that we personally feel are valuable, and then either let people vote on a one-vote-per-person, or a weighted vote depending on a person's average daily folding/computation rate. This would eliminate people being able to just create a ton of sockpuppet accounts on either these or the CureCoin forums, while also allowing the people contributing the most computational power to choose which other projects they would be interested in supporting. We will also take community suggestions, in case we miss an awesome project by accident.

Thanks for the interest! You're completely correct, there are some hurdles to overcome, but considering the possible benefits of this project once it is successfully launched, I'm confident there's a myriad of valid solutions, though it's going to take some brainpower. What are your feelings on the above proposed quick-fixes to work submission? I don't fully understand what the returned work exactly contains (I'm assuming the end-result of a proposed protein fold, but beyond that...) but it appears to be something that isn't easily-verifiable, so I feel that work duplicity/redundancy is probably the most likely way to determine whether a workunit is valid or invalid.

Thanks for the update   I too am closely following your progress. 

Also, could you please respond to:


Thanks

Hoping to hear some replies from the devs to the issues raised by jcoffland!

As far as I know, Curecoin has come out with a LLC registration to mitigate the risk to folding at home, of course that still leaves the security of your point system, which can be hacked after all multiple submissions of work have come in. All solutions to that are quite technical, but considering the composition of our community, all it would take is asking for some help and people will start working on it, give you a complete system to defend the points system.

I would lean toward the Open Transactions library model, use Curecoin as backing for the OT Server and dole out the points as a basket currency. Changing the points after all the work submissions have come in would be very difficult, they would have to compromise all the OT servers to cheat the points system.

Much regards to jcoffland, whose post has enlighted this enigmatical situation.
Questions to Curecoin's developers should be answered if they're so sure of the good future of their product that even are gathering bitcoins from people right now.