10 ms·

FoldingCoin

158 points by snikeris 12y ago

lkbm 12y ago
Is this basically replacing Bitcoins and their proof-of-[useless]-work mining with a new currency whose proof-of-work is useful work (IE, FAH)? If this is viable, it would be pretty grand. As cool as Bitcoin is, it's sad to me that it just eats up energy/computation time to ground its value. Imagine if all that computation time were put to good, scientific use while still providing the same proof-of-work benefit.
- wyager 12y ago
  >Imagine if all that computation time were put to good, scientific use while still providing the same proof-of-work benefit. Cryptographic hashes have the unique property that their difficulty is quite predictable, which is an absolute necessity for PoW based voting systems (like Bitcoin). I don't believe there are any known scientific computation problems that have the same desirable PoW properties as a cryptographic hash algorithm.
  - fryguy 12y ago
    Also, they must be a lottery, in that it's lots of "easy" problems that have a small chance. Otherwise it weakens the "50% attack" by meaning that someone with the most computing power can efficiently "hard" problem much more reliably, rather than the their percentage of the total computing power.
- oafitupa 12y ago
  Unfortunately, it's not viable. Proof of work needs to be "wasteful" (if you can consider validating transactions and keeping the network safe wasteful). I don't understand why so many people get angry at Bitcoin's use electricity and not at say, VISA's, or any other entity that isn't curing cancer.
  - nctr 12y ago
    There is also Proof of Stake to secure the network, which does not waste electricity as much and on top of that the amount of stake you get for each vote to secure the network could also be made dependent on the amount of work you do for a science project as measured by BOINC. The identification of which user gets what amount of "Proof of research" bonus is done via hashed BOINC email, as the email in BOINC is private and cannot be accessed by others. See my other post about gridcoin.
    - oafitupa 12y ago
      There is not "also Proof of Stake", because it's a flawed concept. What's at stake? Nothing. You can sell your coins before starting an attack, so you wouldn't be attacking yourself like you would with Bitcoin and proper mining. Might as well just use the USD or bottle caps as currency.
    - PookTwo 12y ago
      But this has two issues if i am reading this right: 1. Since only Gridcoin has the information of the users, than what is to prevent them from creating fake accounts that they themselves hold and paying themselves more Gridcoins? 2. Unless if every single donor has an encrypted Comodo (or something similar) email with Gridcoin, then emails can be stolen. And if gridcoin becomes valuable enough and emails are not encrypted, then its a sure thing that they will be stolen.
  - rodgerd 12y ago
    Well, the fact that Visa are able to do four orders of magnitude more transactions that Bitcoin, at a minimum, indicates they're at least a great deal more efficient.
    - oafitupa 12y ago
      First of all, the number of transactions Bitcoin can make per unit of time is not set in stone, it depends on certain variables that will be adjusted over time. And it is a distributed system anyway, what did you expect? You can't have both the resilience of a distributed system, and the efficiency of a centralized one. And second, you are comparing apples to oranges. Try comparing VISA (built on top closed networks and decades of bureaucracy) to services like Coinbase/Bitpay (built on top of Bitcoin) and we'll see who's more efficient.
- PookTwo 12y ago
  Heres a good analogy: Visa and the banks are the old way of doing things, they are analog. Blockchain technology and Bitcoin are digital. Years ago when analog signals had no longer been useful and became outdated, it became a law that all signal for television must be broadcast in digital. This was because analog required so much more energy and bandwidth then digital does. What bitcoin offers is a replacement for all the energy and resources that are poured into money transmitters, banks, credit cards, and even recently wall street. The technology is expensive to run, but not more expensive than all of the above combined. And to answer the question of transactions per second, the Bitcoin network is endless. The problem isnt how many transactions can you do, the problem is storage. The blockchain currently is 25 GBs of data that must be stored by many nodes. Though not everyone has to have a nod, if many do not and only big companies do, then it can become once again centralized. Even though 25 GBs is not that much, that is with only around 100-200,000 transactions a day in the BTC network. Visa does 2,000 a second alone. So if the blockchain was to transact 2,000 a second, you are looking at PB hard drives in a year or so. That is the issue to be concerned with. here is a great article for reading on possibly solutions / problems https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability
great_kraken 12y ago
I recently was reading up on folding again. I thought, wouldn't it be great if people could manage to combine protein folding for a good cause with bitcoin mining. Cool idea.
lbotos 12y ago
Has anyone done the math to know if this is profitable in terms of power spent to mine vs mined coin value?
- askmike 12y ago
  This will be dominated by the price, which has been going down in the last 2 weeks [1]. [1]https://www.poloniex.com/exchange#btc_fldc https://www.poloniex.com/exchange#btc_fldc
wyager 12y ago
This is a terrible idea for several reasons, the chief of which is the fact that the difficulty of protein folding simulations is not easily predicted. One consequence of this is that if someone were to develop a more efficient algorithm for protein folding, they could easily dominate the mining market and pull off a 51% attack. You could argue that this might have a positive societal impact, but it would also probably destroy the foldingcoin network. The reason Bitcoin (and most/all other good proof-of-work systems) use repeated application of a cryptographic hash is that it's A) very predictable how long finding a solution will take (on average) and B) unlikely that someone will destroy the proof-of-work system by inventing a more efficient method of calculating the hash.
- PookTwo 12y ago
  Where there is profit there is competition. As a miner years ago, i was able to produce a lot of bitcoins with my GPU setup. When the ASICs came out i tried to compete, but simply did not have the capital. But other people did. And it wasnt just one person, it was a few big companies that did this. So no longer is the individual able to mine BTC, its now a profession. So if this happened to FLDC, that wouldnt really be a bad thing, because if it is to happen, then that would mean FLDC has gained enough value for someone to pour money into being the top folder. So then the economy of FLDC would be where the general public has the interest and the Folders would simply be a profession.
mrb 12y ago
A decentralized digital currency where the proof-of-work has a second utility having a great commercial value (such as folding proteins) would be quite frankly revolutionary and would have a good chance at displacing Bitcoin. But FoldingCoin is not that currency, because there is a huge downside in their design: they had to completely give up decentralization, which is the primary innovation and differentiator that block chain-based currencies like Bitcoin bring. Instead, FoldingCoin relies on the Stanford University Folding@home network, on the stats reported by this network, to distribute units of the currency proportionately to the amount of work. This means the Folding@home network could alter the distribution of coins at will, if it is attacked by hackers (likely), or if it operates maliciously (less likely). This means FoldingCoin would be unable to continue operating the day a single entity (the university) decides to stop running the Folding@home network. And so on. All the inconvenients and risks of centralization exist with FoldingCoin. Trust me, I really wish it would be possible to design a decentralized digital currency built on a protein-folding proof-of-work, but so far nobody has found a way to do this in a decentralized way. Edit: they openly acknowledge the fact FoldingCoin is not decentralized, see http://foldingcoin.net/fldc-vs-alts/ http://foldingcoin.net/fldc-vs-alts/ : "With Counterparty there is no current way of doing decentralized asset creation and issuance" Edit #2: in theory a decentralized currency based on a protein-folding proof-of-work can exist and would work this way: compute a hash of a block of pending transactions and of the previous block hash (like Bitcoin). Use the resulting hash as a seed to deterministically generate a set of protein-folding problems. Miners try to solve them. Once a sufficient amount of these problems is solved (depending on a "difficulty factor"), broadcast the solutions and the transactions on the network, hence creating a new hash for the next set of protein folding problems. I don't know very much about protein folding, but as I understand the open problems are: (1) how to deterministically generate a set of useful protein-folding problems according to rules that should stay immutable for decades (you can't ask the participants to have to frequently update their mining software because consensus on these rules is hard to change), and (2) how to reduce the size of the solutions data published to the network every block without overflowing it (it is my understanding that protein folding would generate way more than a few hundred kilobytes every 10min which is the current average Bitcoin block size).
- PookTwo 12y ago
lappa 12y ago
The reason SHA256 was chosen is that it is a hash function. Hash functions are meant to be easy to calculate but difficult or near impossible to reverse and near impossible to optimize. MD2 was designed by cryptographers and has tons of research regarding it's security. It is now broken. Protein folding basically has no research regarding it's security as a hash function, because it isn't designed as a hash function. Protein folding almost certainly has a large optimization problem, an attacker likely could find ways to increase his mining power by orders of magnitude. If the currency became valueable, it is inevitable that someone would make solving this problem constant time. Now, is making protein folding more a efficient a good thing? Absolutely! But the only way it can be made more efficient is by making this currency useless. Essentially, the only way this currency can be useful to DNA folding is if the currency becomes useless for securing money. Edit: It appears that foldingcoin is on top of the bitcoin blockchain so miners aren't even there for consensus. They are simply creating a speculative asset that has an increasing monetary supply that equates to donations to protein folding. The miners are completely unnecessary for security.
- jonas21 12y ago
  > Protein folding almost certainly has large optimization problem, an attacker likely could find ways to increase his mining power by orders of magnitude. As you mentioned, this is a good thing. And as far as the effects on the currency go, this doesn't seem any different from Bitcoin miners moving from CPUs to GPUs to ASICs. > If the currency became valueable, it is inevitable that someone would make solving this problem constant time. Protein folding / structure prediction is NP-complete, so seems unlikely.
  - lappa 12y ago
    >As you mentioned, this is a good thing. And as far as the effects on the currency go, this doesn't seem any different from Bitcoin miners moving from CPUs to GPUs to ASICs. The optimization "problem" is a problem because it can wipe out the currency. The transition to better hardware was gradual, while a software optimization could literally make one persons CPU more efficient than the rest of the world combined. >Protein folding / structure prediction is NP-complete, so seems unlikely. While it may be difficult to actually fold the protein, folding the protein such that it breaks one of the assumptions I listed may be trivial. If we could simply use NP-hard proven problems as hash functions, we would.
mintplant 12y ago
Can the result of one of these "Work Units" be easily checked for correctness? Or does someone have to redo the work to confirm?
- PookTwo 12y ago
  if you are a certified medical researcher you can request to review the WUs. Many might not produce real results, but in the words of thomas edison: I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
web007 12y ago
Sounds like http://primecoin.io/about.php http://primecoin.io/about.php but more widely useful. Good luck @PookTwo!
Forbo 12y ago
For a similar concept, there's also Gridcoin which uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing as it's proof of work. http://gridcoin.us/ http://gridcoin.us/
stegosaurus 12y ago
Proof-of-work having secondary commercial utility is troublesome because it can result in a situation where the secondary utility becomes more valuable than the former, in which case the currency is liable to collapse. I tend to think that proof-of-work must be inherently useless in order for it to function for this reason - otherwise, it's not 'work'.
- PookTwo 12y ago
  I disagree. I think that Counterparty adds value to the Bitcoin platform. I envision BTC almost being like gold, not something that will ultimately be used everyday. I think a token built inside of Counterparty will be that everyday used token. Its kind of like the internet, the original value of the internet was to transfer files from point A to point B. Then came: email, the browser, instant messaging, online shopping, social media, streaming, ext..... This adds additional value to the Bitcoin blockchain thus making it more desirable to have. But i do agree that the miners should work on useless algorithms, that is the best way to keep it just and fair, but building applications inside of that is just fantastic
jabgrabdthrow 12y ago
"Useful proof-of-work" is still less desirable for the coin holders than proof-of-stake, so capital will move out of this coin and into a POS coin
nosuchthing 12y ago
Seems harder to solve algorithmically, rather than as a single private company with clients who rent hardware / CPU / GPU time for hire.
grcnation 12y ago
Really decentralized cryptographically secured rewards for advancing research: Gridcoin (intro at http://uscore.net http://uscore.net)

158 points by snikeris 12y ago

lkbm 12y ago

Is this basically replacing Bitcoins and their proof-of-[useless]-work mining with a new currency whose proof-of-work is useful work (IE, FAH)? If this is viable, it would be pretty grand. As cool as Bitcoin is, it's sad to me that it just eats up energy/computation time to ground its value. Imagine if all that computation time were put to good, scientific use while still providing the same proof-of-work benefit.

wyager 12y ago
>Imagine if all that computation time were put to good, scientific use while still providing the same proof-of-work benefit. Cryptographic hashes have the unique property that their difficulty is quite predictable, which is an absolute necessity for PoW based voting systems (like Bitcoin). I don't believe there are any known scientific computation problems that have the same desirable PoW properties as a cryptographic hash algorithm.
- fryguy 12y ago
  Also, they must be a lottery, in that it's lots of "easy" problems that have a small chance. Otherwise it weakens the "50% attack" by meaning that someone with the most computing power can efficiently "hard" problem much more reliably, rather than the their percentage of the total computing power.
oafitupa 12y ago
Unfortunately, it's not viable. Proof of work needs to be "wasteful" (if you can consider validating transactions and keeping the network safe wasteful). I don't understand why so many people get angry at Bitcoin's use electricity and not at say, VISA's, or any other entity that isn't curing cancer.
- nctr 12y ago
  There is also Proof of Stake to secure the network, which does not waste electricity as much and on top of that the amount of stake you get for each vote to secure the network could also be made dependent on the amount of work you do for a science project as measured by BOINC. The identification of which user gets what amount of "Proof of research" bonus is done via hashed BOINC email, as the email in BOINC is private and cannot be accessed by others. See my other post about gridcoin.
  - oafitupa 12y ago
    There is not "also Proof of Stake", because it's a flawed concept. What's at stake? Nothing. You can sell your coins before starting an attack, so you wouldn't be attacking yourself like you would with Bitcoin and proper mining. Might as well just use the USD or bottle caps as currency.
  - PookTwo 12y ago
    But this has two issues if i am reading this right: 1. Since only Gridcoin has the information of the users, than what is to prevent them from creating fake accounts that they themselves hold and paying themselves more Gridcoins? 2. Unless if every single donor has an encrypted Comodo (or something similar) email with Gridcoin, then emails can be stolen. And if gridcoin becomes valuable enough and emails are not encrypted, then its a sure thing that they will be stolen.
- rodgerd 12y ago
  Well, the fact that Visa are able to do four orders of magnitude more transactions that Bitcoin, at a minimum, indicates they're at least a great deal more efficient.
  - oafitupa 12y ago
    First of all, the number of transactions Bitcoin can make per unit of time is not set in stone, it depends on certain variables that will be adjusted over time. And it is a distributed system anyway, what did you expect? You can't have both the resilience of a distributed system, and the efficiency of a centralized one. And second, you are comparing apples to oranges. Try comparing VISA (built on top closed networks and decades of bureaucracy) to services like Coinbase/Bitpay (built on top of Bitcoin) and we'll see who's more efficient.
PookTwo 12y ago
Heres a good analogy: Visa and the banks are the old way of doing things, they are analog. Blockchain technology and Bitcoin are digital. Years ago when analog signals had no longer been useful and became outdated, it became a law that all signal for television must be broadcast in digital. This was because analog required so much more energy and bandwidth then digital does. What bitcoin offers is a replacement for all the energy and resources that are poured into money transmitters, banks, credit cards, and even recently wall street. The technology is expensive to run, but not more expensive than all of the above combined. And to answer the question of transactions per second, the Bitcoin network is endless. The problem isnt how many transactions can you do, the problem is storage. The blockchain currently is 25 GBs of data that must be stored by many nodes. Though not everyone has to have a nod, if many do not and only big companies do, then it can become once again centralized. Even though 25 GBs is not that much, that is with only around 100-200,000 transactions a day in the BTC network. Visa does 2,000 a second alone. So if the blockchain was to transact 2,000 a second, you are looking at PB hard drives in a year or so. That is the issue to be concerned with. here is a great article for reading on possibly solutions / problems https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

great_kraken 12y ago

I recently was reading up on folding again. I thought, wouldn't it be great if people could manage to combine protein folding for a good cause with bitcoin mining. Cool idea.

lbotos 12y ago

Has anyone done the math to know if this is profitable in terms of power spent to mine vs mined coin value?

askmike 12y ago
This will be dominated by the price, which has been going down in the last 2 weeks [1]. [1]https://www.poloniex.com/exchange#btc_fldc https://www.poloniex.com/exchange#btc_fldc

wyager 12y ago

This is a terrible idea for several reasons, the chief of which is the fact that the difficulty of protein folding simulations is not easily predicted. One consequence of this is that if someone were to develop a more efficient algorithm for protein folding, they could easily dominate the mining market and pull off a 51% attack. You could argue that this might have a positive societal impact, but it would also probably destroy the foldingcoin network. The reason Bitcoin (and most/all other good proof-of-work systems) use repeated application of a cryptographic hash is that it's A) very predictable how long finding a solution will take (on average) and B) unlikely that someone will destroy the proof-of-work system by inventing a more efficient method of calculating the hash.

PookTwo 12y ago
Where there is profit there is competition. As a miner years ago, i was able to produce a lot of bitcoins with my GPU setup. When the ASICs came out i tried to compete, but simply did not have the capital. But other people did. And it wasnt just one person, it was a few big companies that did this. So no longer is the individual able to mine BTC, its now a profession. So if this happened to FLDC, that wouldnt really be a bad thing, because if it is to happen, then that would mean FLDC has gained enough value for someone to pour money into being the top folder. So then the economy of FLDC would be where the general public has the interest and the Folders would simply be a profession.

mrb 12y ago

A decentralized digital currency where the proof-of-work has a second utility having a great commercial value (such as folding proteins) would be quite frankly revolutionary and would have a good chance at displacing Bitcoin. But FoldingCoin is not that currency, because there is a huge downside in their design: they had to completely give up decentralization, which is the primary innovation and differentiator that block chain-based currencies like Bitcoin bring. Instead, FoldingCoin relies on the Stanford University Folding@home network, on the stats reported by this network, to distribute units of the currency proportionately to the amount of work. This means the Folding@home network could alter the distribution of coins at will, if it is attacked by hackers (likely), or if it operates maliciously (less likely). This means FoldingCoin would be unable to continue operating the day a single entity (the university) decides to stop running the Folding@home network. And so on. All the inconvenients and risks of centralization exist with FoldingCoin. Trust me, I really wish it would be possible to design a decentralized digital currency built on a protein-folding proof-of-work, but so far nobody has found a way to do this in a decentralized way. Edit: they openly acknowledge the fact FoldingCoin is not decentralized, see http://foldingcoin.net/fldc-vs-alts/ http://foldingcoin.net/fldc-vs-alts/ : "With Counterparty there is no current way of doing decentralized asset creation and issuance" Edit #2: in theory a decentralized currency based on a protein-folding proof-of-work can exist and would work this way: compute a hash of a block of pending transactions and of the previous block hash (like Bitcoin). Use the resulting hash as a seed to deterministically generate a set of protein-folding problems. Miners try to solve them. Once a sufficient amount of these problems is solved (depending on a "difficulty factor"), broadcast the solutions and the transactions on the network, hence creating a new hash for the next set of protein folding problems. I don't know very much about protein folding, but as I understand the open problems are: (1) how to deterministically generate a set of useful protein-folding problems according to rules that should stay immutable for decades (you can't ask the participants to have to frequently update their mining software because consensus on these rules is hard to change), and (2) how to reduce the size of the solutions data published to the network every block without overflowing it (it is my understanding that protein folding would generate way more than a few hundred kilobytes every 10min which is the current average Bitcoin block size).

PookTwo 12y ago

lappa 12y ago

The reason SHA256 was chosen is that it is a hash function. Hash functions are meant to be easy to calculate but difficult or near impossible to reverse and near impossible to optimize. MD2 was designed by cryptographers and has tons of research regarding it's security. It is now broken. Protein folding basically has no research regarding it's security as a hash function, because it isn't designed as a hash function. Protein folding almost certainly has a large optimization problem, an attacker likely could find ways to increase his mining power by orders of magnitude. If the currency became valueable, it is inevitable that someone would make solving this problem constant time. Now, is making protein folding more a efficient a good thing? Absolutely! But the only way it can be made more efficient is by making this currency useless. Essentially, the only way this currency can be useful to DNA folding is if the currency becomes useless for securing money. Edit: It appears that foldingcoin is on top of the bitcoin blockchain so miners aren't even there for consensus. They are simply creating a speculative asset that has an increasing monetary supply that equates to donations to protein folding. The miners are completely unnecessary for security.

jonas21 12y ago
> Protein folding almost certainly has large optimization problem, an attacker likely could find ways to increase his mining power by orders of magnitude. As you mentioned, this is a good thing. And as far as the effects on the currency go, this doesn't seem any different from Bitcoin miners moving from CPUs to GPUs to ASICs. > If the currency became valueable, it is inevitable that someone would make solving this problem constant time. Protein folding / structure prediction is NP-complete, so seems unlikely.
- lappa 12y ago
  >As you mentioned, this is a good thing. And as far as the effects on the currency go, this doesn't seem any different from Bitcoin miners moving from CPUs to GPUs to ASICs. The optimization "problem" is a problem because it can wipe out the currency. The transition to better hardware was gradual, while a software optimization could literally make one persons CPU more efficient than the rest of the world combined. >Protein folding / structure prediction is NP-complete, so seems unlikely. While it may be difficult to actually fold the protein, folding the protein such that it breaks one of the assumptions I listed may be trivial. If we could simply use NP-hard proven problems as hash functions, we would.

mintplant 12y ago

Can the result of one of these "Work Units" be easily checked for correctness? Or does someone have to redo the work to confirm?

PookTwo 12y ago
if you are a certified medical researcher you can request to review the WUs. Many might not produce real results, but in the words of thomas edison: I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

web007 12y ago

Sounds like http://primecoin.io/about.php http://primecoin.io/about.php but more widely useful. Good luck @PookTwo!

Forbo 12y ago

For a similar concept, there's also Gridcoin which uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing as it's proof of work. http://gridcoin.us/ http://gridcoin.us/

stegosaurus 12y ago

Proof-of-work having secondary commercial utility is troublesome because it can result in a situation where the secondary utility becomes more valuable than the former, in which case the currency is liable to collapse. I tend to think that proof-of-work must be inherently useless in order for it to function for this reason - otherwise, it's not 'work'.

PookTwo 12y ago
I disagree. I think that Counterparty adds value to the Bitcoin platform. I envision BTC almost being like gold, not something that will ultimately be used everyday. I think a token built inside of Counterparty will be that everyday used token. Its kind of like the internet, the original value of the internet was to transfer files from point A to point B. Then came: email, the browser, instant messaging, online shopping, social media, streaming, ext..... This adds additional value to the Bitcoin blockchain thus making it more desirable to have. But i do agree that the miners should work on useless algorithms, that is the best way to keep it just and fair, but building applications inside of that is just fantastic

jabgrabdthrow 12y ago

"Useful proof-of-work" is still less desirable for the coin holders than proof-of-stake, so capital will move out of this coin and into a POS coin

nosuchthing 12y ago

Seems harder to solve algorithmically, rather than as a single private company with clients who rent hardware / CPU / GPU time for hire.

grcnation 12y ago

Really decentralized cryptographically secured rewards for advancing research: Gridcoin (intro at http://uscore.net http://uscore.net)