Hello, I apologize for coming late to the discussion. I am one of the main developers at Folding@home. Vijay Pande (Folding@home project leader) and I have been talking and he has given me permission to make some comments in this forum regarding F@H's position on CureCoin. I can confirm that the CureCoin developers have spoken with Dr. Pande but we are not working closely with them at this point. I do not profess to know precisely Dr. Pande's opinion so much of this is my own and I will take the blame.
I am very excited about the idea of finding a way for people to contribute to F@H while at the same time earning crypto coin, however, I am skeptical about CureCoin's implementation for a number of reasons and I urge the CureCoin devs to attempt to provide clear answers to the following questions:
1. Precisely how will CureCoin guarantee that people are fairly credited CureCoin for valid F@H work? CureCoin devs have repeatedly asserted that we have solved this problem for them but I disagree.
The truth is, our system is not rock solid. We depend on the users to mostly act in our interest and on some manual intervention. This is also the sole reason that some of Folding@home is not Open-Source. We have Open-Sourced several parts of F@H and are working on Open-Sourcing more. We rely on obfuscated detection of tampering as well as the goodwill of our users to protect the scientific results and the point system. We would like to be fully Open-Source but as of yet no one has figured out how to efficiently execute arbitrary code in an untrusted environment with hard guarantees of security. BitCoin provides hard guarantees through cryptography and by relying on very specific code, i.e. SHA256 hashes.
We are currently only dealing with points which have no monetary value. Regardless, some of our users still get very upset when we get it wrong, which does happen on occasion and people still do occasionally cheat. We are quite worried about what would happen if the points had real value.
2. Why do the CureCoin devs get 10%? This seems excessive. The money expended by Stanford over the last decade far exceeds anything CureCoin could have committed thus far and CureCoin is largely using the reputation of Folding@home to launch itself. This seems unfair. In addition, I understand that CureCoin has already received a substantial sum in donations.
3. The bigger question is do we also have to trust CureCoin to fairly deal out the 45% share that is to go to those contributing to Folding@home and presumably other disease related projects in the future? How will you guarantee that points issued by Folding@home will equal coins in CureCoin? I am assuming that some central server at CureCoin will query Folding@home's servers and allocate the funds. I am also assuming that in the future CureCoin will decide how to share these funds among different scientific projects. Who decides what projects are worthy?
Don't get me wrong, I love the idea and think you guys have come a long way towards an actual implementation of something people have been asking for since the early days of BitCoin but I feel there are important questions to be answered before moving forward. Many people are working on this and there are a lot of ideas out there but I'm not convinced we've yet found the solution. When we do find a solid solution I pledge my support. I believe Folding@home has a big role to play in this and I will do what is in my power to help.
I am very excited about the idea of finding a way for people to contribute to F@H while at the same time earning crypto coin, however, I am skeptical about CureCoin's implementation for a number of reasons and I urge the CureCoin devs to attempt to provide clear answers to the following questions:
1. Precisely how will CureCoin guarantee that people are fairly credited CureCoin for valid F@H work? CureCoin devs have repeatedly asserted that we have solved this problem for them but I disagree.
I still don't think I understand why one can't just fake folding work and submit it? Will peers be performing duplicate work to confirm?
Yup, there is some work duplication to be submitted, over the years Stanford has developed quite a good system for work validation. The truth is, our system is not rock solid. We depend on the users to mostly act in our interest and on some manual intervention. This is also the sole reason that some of Folding@home is not Open-Source. We have Open-Sourced several parts of F@H and are working on Open-Sourcing more. We rely on obfuscated detection of tampering as well as the goodwill of our users to protect the scientific results and the point system. We would like to be fully Open-Source but as of yet no one has figured out how to efficiently execute arbitrary code in an untrusted environment with hard guarantees of security. BitCoin provides hard guarantees through cryptography and by relying on very specific code, i.e. SHA256 hashes.
We are currently only dealing with points which have no monetary value. Regardless, some of our users still get very upset when we get it wrong, which does happen on occasion and people still do occasionally cheat. We are quite worried about what would happen if the points had real value.
2. Why do the CureCoin devs get 10%? This seems excessive. The money expended by Stanford over the last decade far exceeds anything CureCoin could have committed thus far and CureCoin is largely using the reputation of Folding@home to launch itself. This seems unfair. In addition, I understand that CureCoin has already received a substantial sum in donations.
3. The bigger question is do we also have to trust CureCoin to fairly deal out the 45% share that is to go to those contributing to Folding@home and presumably other disease related projects in the future? How will you guarantee that points issued by Folding@home will equal coins in CureCoin? I am assuming that some central server at CureCoin will query Folding@home's servers and allocate the funds. I am also assuming that in the future CureCoin will decide how to share these funds among different scientific projects. Who decides what projects are worthy?
Don't get me wrong, I love the idea and think you guys have come a long way towards an actual implementation of something people have been asking for since the early days of BitCoin but I feel there are important questions to be answered before moving forward. Many people are working on this and there are a lot of ideas out there but I'm not convinced we've yet found the solution. When we do find a solid solution I pledge my support. I believe Folding@home has a big role to play in this and I will do what is in my power to help.
Thank you for your writeup. Its dissapointing news, but i agree with you completely. Those problems need to be solved. It worries me that you have had only brief contact with them. Judging from your post i can assume that we are nowhere close to launch. This makes me sad.
