Patches welcome. I'd love to do protein folding too.
We see this with Recaptcha where when it was first launched, some news sites praised it as making good use of what would have otherwise been wasted human effort. But eventually I started to see negative comments along the lines of how Recaptcha is just extracting free work to train self driving cars, nevermind the part about stopping bots. Since Recaptcha is now sometimes non-interactive, I am not sure if that data is still used for training, other than to improve Recaptcha itself, but the negative sentiment still holds whether that data is used or not.
Were Anubis to add crypto mining, even if all the revenue went to Techaro, you could still say "the enshittification is a shame, but at least they're not Google". Using the compute for BOINC protein folding somehow should be unobjectionable.
P.S. Great to see you, omoikane
That being said I don't know any crypto that would technically fit as a lightweight PoW.
If it mined crypto instead of just burn clock cycles, then that could not in any way serve to lower its ranking in my book. It's already at minimum.