Since December 2013 I’ve been playing around with cryptocurrency, the most popular one being Bitcoin. You may have heard about it on the news or on the internet here and there over the last few months. Bitcoin has been around since early 2009, but didn’t really go mainstream until last fall when the price shot up to over $1100 a coin. I decided to jump into the game with a few rigs that do nothing but ‘mine’ Bitcoin and other alternate coins based off of it.

Because of this, we now have a new sub-forum entitled ‘cryptocurrency’ and have seen an influx of new users to the site. There are a few posts in that forum already, showing off everyone’s mining rigs, how-to’s for certain programs, etc. If you have any questions about mining for digital currency, or want to post about your own experiences, feel free.

So now, we have an alternate coin that just went live less than a week ago that has more of a purpose than just solving an evermore complex mathematical problem that doesn’t do any good for anybody other than the coin it produces. Those of you reading this may remember when Hardfought created its own Folding@Home team (it’s still alive thanks to Grant :) ). What is ‘folding’? In this particular instance, it’s a process in which you use your computers CPU and GPU to help solve all of the different ways a protein can ‘fold’ into different shapes, and how they fold determines how they interact with other proteins. There isn’t a supercomputer on the planet that has enough computational power to solve all the ways even a single protein can fold in a quick amount of time. That’s where Folding@Home comes in – they devised a method of distributed computing in which each persons home computer takes a small piece of the problem, works on it, solves it, uploads it to the F@H servers, then grabs another piece. So on and so forth. So what once would have taken years if not decades to solve now only takes months. Folding@Home has been active for almost fifteen years now, with millions of computers working on cures for diseases such as many forms of cancer, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s just to name a few. And the only compensation all of these ‘folders’ have received for their time and money spent, is knowing that they are helping to find a cure. Nothing more.

Enter Curecoin – a cryptocurrency developed by a small team of people who are passionate about the Folding@Home project who have worked out a way for folders to earn Curecoin while folding. You can mine for this coin just like you can for Bitcoin, also. I wont go into all the technical details here, but I will say that this is unlike any other digital currency to date. The work you’re doing to earn coins actually has a purpose; the work is not wasted, and actually benefits everyone. There are a couple other coins out whose proof of work has purpose (Primecoin, Namecoin), but this is the first one that actually HELPS people.

To learn more about Curecoin, see the announcement thread here – https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=603757.0, their official forums can be found at http://www.curecoin.us, a great how-to and knowledge base site – http://www.curecoin.net, and the pool most of us mine at can be found at http://cure.cryptopools.com https://cure.united-miners.com. I’ll post in this news post thread where you need to go to start earning Curecoin via folding.

Happy folding :)