Interesting insight in this Token Fest video - looks like Veriblock scheduled to use Vorksholk's CureCoin for their initial use-case - that's great news. Any ETA on GA and integration of CURE (assuming this is the awaited next-gen version of CureCoin).

https://youtu.be/uAuEX99dTGA see 04:25 for the CureCoin use-case introduction.

You're mostly correct. There are some common misconception dating back to the launch of CureCoin about its efficiency. People also often confuse how CureCoin works with the way GridCoin Classic worked in the early days.

CureCoin is designed to split available coins roughly 80/20 between Folding@Home participants and SHA256 miners.

However today, since difficulty is high, SHA256 mining activity is unprofitable in CureCoin and therefore very low. PoS takes up the slack for the low SHA256 participation. So as I understand it , today CureCoin uses ~90% of electricity directly on science - with the remaining 10% energy being split between SHA mining and PoS transactions.

If you fold for CureCoin, or merge-fold with FoldingCoin, you can allocate 100% of your CPU AND GPU power to folding - no SHA256 parallel mining is required (like it used to be in GridCoin Classic). But you still have the choice to use an ASIC in mining pools that support CureCoin. At this point, CureCoin requires very little SHA256 mining power to remain viable (but in 1.0 it remains an option).

If I'm wrong, hopefully one of the devs will correct me.

Thanks for the explanation. Is there a decent info-graphic that shows how this works? I think it would really help bring the complexity down to earth for the "casual cruncher".

I'm not sure I know the full answer. I'd recommend asking on their ANN:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=603757.3080

My guess would be:

1. CureCoin probably felt teams don't want members who are folding with an unfair advantage competing against those who don't (monetization vs philanthropy). That was mentioned on the ANN somewhere.
2. FoldingCoin does let you stay on your own team, BUT you have to change your username (that's why if you want to merge-fold, you have to change your username to the FoldingCoin format)

Agree with you and hats off - Gridcoin really has created an eco-system. I need to do some more due diligence - I've just been doing rosetta and gpugrid for the past year but haven't taken the time to determine how the payouts work. Since there are so many projects, I assumed it was weighted by the number of RAC completed on each project rather than evenly spread.

I also agree with using science coins to introduce crypto-currency outside the bitcoin bubble. If they don't get bitcoin's value proposition, thanks to science coins, they don't have to.

I can say that the one personal turn-off I've had to gridcoin has been the introduction of Bitcoin Utopia. After reading incessant fan-boy posts about it during its introduction (especially by some of the loudest voices on the Folding EVGA forum of all places?!) tied my stomach in knots. People supporting it were like middle-school bullies with a condescending tone - lots of "IMHO..." and "MY Project... Bitcoin Utopia...". The same people pushing for Bitcoin Utopia on Gridcoin / BOINC were condemning CureCoin on Folding@Home (that tone you probably recognize - "greedy cure coiners", and "coin's for folding, NO THANK YOU!" - which I thought was ironic since the primary goal is to get more science done. Anyway that's been my personal experience, and I never looked at Bitcoin Utopia since.

BTW, remember you can merge-fold CureCoin with FoldingCoin and four other coins I believe, so it's more bang for your buck to check out merge-folding:

http://foldingcoin.net/2015/02/earn-fldc-on-the-curecoin-team/

You will have to change your FAH username for merge-folding to do something like "raitpngman_ALL_".
That will become clear once you read the article.

For CureCoin, you MUST be folding for team 224497 (CureCoin Team) in order to earn CURE

It really depends on your rig, how fast it can process and return work units, and whether the work units are CPU or GPU based.

A dedicated gaming system with a decent GPU for example, might process up to four large jobs per day. New job downloads can be 1-2MB, while an upload (after processing) can be 2-4MB. So worst case that would total about 24MB/day (that's on the high side). Over a month that's about 720MB.

If you are doing CPU-only or NaCl work units on a laptop, the bandwidth requirement is much, MUCH less.

You can search foldingforum.org or boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/ for more specific answers on file size.

I would recommend if you're on a budget, stick with NaCl on FAH or some slow jobs, like rossetta@home on BOINC and meassure how much extra bandwidth they use of a couple days. Then look to buying the coins on exchanges. Currently, few people are making money on GridCoin or CureCoin, so you can pick these coins up at a fraction of what they actually cost most crunchers and folders to produce.

To me it's a bit of Apple vs Microsoft in the early days (although it's more Apples to Oranges). Both coins face similar challenges in terms of centralization (reliance of work units coming from Folding@Home or the BOINC networks).

Even though Gridcoin was able to decentralize it's coin (BTW no currency is truly decentralized, but that's another discussion), the transition came at a price of some exploits, and some user's lost coins along the way. The last Gridcoin reboot didn't seem to catapult it's true value inside the crypto community bubble.

CureCoin has faced its challenges with missed ETAs on CureCoin 2.0 (which will be decentralized) But has been stable through its two year history. Their plans are ambitious (esp. with SigmaX) but resources are limited.  Even if CureCoin released 2.0 today, it's value would likely come from outside the current bitcoin community (that's just my opinion). The true value for crypto purists would be in the SigmaX PoW.

Speaking of the broader crypto community, they continue to fixate on things like Litecoin, Dogecoin "To The Moon" :-D, and most recently Ethereum's Frontier is sucking up a LOT of GPU power. Some suggest science coins could create Ethereum tokens, which would be cool, but then it would just be an Ethereum version of FoldingCoin - which already lives on CounterParty, and derives it's value through donations distributed to protein folders.

The polarization between long-time distributed computing participants (anonymous altruists) and typical bitcoin investors (ethical egoist) could NOT be more opposed, and perhaps this is another challenge all science coins face. The loudest voices on bitcointalk tend to whip things into a schizophrenic frenzy in order to benefit themselves. This is truly unfortunate.

Some parting thoughts:

GridCoin has a large community with a diverse mix of projects, but it has some exploits in its history, and overall output of the BOINC network in terms of PetaFLOPs is about half that of Folding@Home. BOINC projects are hard to value. People are crunching 10x more RAC on MilkyWay than Rosetta@Home. It becomes a question of priorities. But certainly they have a larger platform to experiment on, like their Neural Network statistics server and the finance project they experimented with. Perhaps what makes GridCoin somewhat confusing to me (and I mine and hold it) is the eccentric relationship with bitcoin utopia whose RAC on the Gridcoin network exceeds the TOTAL out of the network by a factor of 40! Anyway it's all for a good cause, and Bitcoin Utopia did help fund the MilkyWay project and is designed to do "good", but to me, it's just a bit of an admission of defeat when the biggest incentive on a network is to mine bitcoins (with a lower case "b") instead of focusing energy on getting science done.

CureCoin and FoldingCoin (which can be merge-mined) have a single focus to help Folding@Home find drug-able states in proteins related to "deadly disease". They have a more stable history in terms of security. *IF* CureCoin ever gets 2.0 out of beta, it will add value since their new SigmaX blockchain is designed to be quantum computer resistant (I merge-mine and beta test SigmaX so I'm obviously biased in my opinions). But that being said, CureCoin and FoldingCoin are still dependent on one, albeit extremely large, distributed computing consortium of universities and institutions (incidentally Folding@Home is much more than just Stanford and even includes institutions like Hong Kong University of Science and Technology). On a small scale, CureCoin has proven it can be used to help fund it's underlying research without resorting to mining bitcoin. BTW, Nothing is easier for a newb than loading Folding@Home's NaCl client in a chrome browser and registering on the folding pool.

Diversification is always the best bet. I wouldn't be putting my life savings into any of these ventures individually, but they all make an interesting hedge.

Yes there is a benefit of earning proof-of-stake (POS) when the coins are in your own wallet ... download the wallet from:

https://cryptocointalk.com/topic/2144-emercoin-emc-information/

Skip down to downloads. After installing create a receiver address and send your coins from POLO to the address.

With proper redundant backups (throw one into your safety deposit box) you coins are probably safer than sitting on an exchange - esp if they gain in value and the exchange gets hacked (like what happened to Cryptsy although POLO I think is pretty tight - you just never know after Gox)