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