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.
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.
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.
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.