Quote from: Jordan23 on April 21, 2014, 06:37:30 PM

LONG time lurker. Love this website! Anyhow I find that explaining the mining process is very difficult for non-tech people to non-tech people. Stanford University does a "folding proteins at home" thing that looks similar to mining. Anyone ever heard of it and is it a good comparison?

I suppose it is all in how you look at things.

To me, they are identical. I do both as an excuse to play with new toys. It is fun to build your epeen stuffing as many GPU's as you can in one system or optimizing your ppd/$ err, ghash/$. It doesn't make much difference to me whether I am folding proteins or making bitcoins. Though, making bitcoins allows me to exchange the results of my work for more toys which is something you can't do by folding proteins.

So, if you are an outsider who doesn't know a bitcoin from a protein? Well, yeah, they are pretty much the same Wink

But, if you are into mining bitcoins to make a profit, or you are a biologist trying to find a cure for cancer? Yeah, then they are very, very different.