You're right, I was curious whether it was just me you played the insane game of "pretend what they said is fallacious then when they explain why they're wrong call them an astroturfer".
663 karma · joined January 25, 2014
You can reach me at andrew@hn.rew.la
What else could you possible think I meant when I said the money goes towards protein folding?
>Other blockchains require a lot of maintenance and patches, we do not. Almost no overhead
You have the Bitcoin blockchain as overhead and you have the security of the Bitcoin blockchain, however you have created a speculative asset that is Bitcoin plus a mandatory tax for protein folding.
Realistically, what you have done here is made a centralized currency in which you issue new coins for yourself then we trust you donate the coins to protein folding.
We can already donate to protein folding with Bitcoin so I don't see much use in making an altcoin that does it in a less useful way.
"Mine Medicine, Not Hashes" implies that this is somehow useful for medicine. It really is just a pump and dump where a portion of the money goes to protein folding.
The optimization "problem" is a problem because it can wipe out the currency. The transition to better hardware was gradual, while a software optimization could literally make one persons CPU more efficient than the rest of the world combined.
>Protein folding / structure prediction is NP-complete, so seems unlikely.
While it may be difficult to actually fold the protein, folding the protein such that it breaks one of the assumptions I listed may be trivial.
If we could simply use NP-hard proven problems as hash functions, we would.
MD2 was designed by cryptographers and has tons of research regarding it's security. It is now broken.
Protein folding basically has no research regarding it's security as a hash function, because it isn't designed as a hash function.
Protein folding almost certainly has a large optimization problem, an attacker likely could find ways to increase his mining power by orders of magnitude. If the currency became valueable, it is inevitable that someone would make solving this problem constant time.
Now, is making protein folding more a efficient a good thing? Absolutely! But the only way it can be made more efficient is by making this currency useless.
Essentially, the only way this currency can be useful to DNA folding is if the currency becomes useless for securing money.
Edit: It appears that foldingcoin is on top of the bitcoin blockchain so miners aren't even there for consensus. They are simply creating a speculative asset that has an increasing monetary supply that equates to donations to protein folding. The miners are completely unnecessary for security.
I'm done with this discussion at this point. I don't think you really have a concrete claim regarding the topic and you are avoiding creating one by derailing the conversation by arguing my question is fallacious.
Please, if your position isn't what I asked, state what it is.
"A straw man is a common type of argument and is an informal fallacy based on the misrepresentation of an opponent's argument."
I haven't misrepresented your argument in any way since I haven't represented your argument in any way. I never claimed you claimed anything. It isn't fallacious to ask someone to clarify an argument.
You didn't explicitly state your argument (or anything of substance), so I asked what you were actually trying to claim.
[1] http://blog.coinbase.com/post/95927658922/coinbase-is-insure...
We can say "there is a food shortage" because a certain amount of food is necessary for a society to survive. The same can't be said of software developers.
Also, if you argue a high price means it is scarce, does that mean there is a shortage of hedge fund managers and CEOs?
Basically the purpose for Riecoins PoW is to be broken which doesn't make invest from the perspective of someone using it as a currency.
The US private R&D spending is over $100billion. Spending $3000 per person on what would be mostly foreign aid (7bn vs 300mn people) would be controversial.
Micropayments that aren't channels will be possible when fees are lower.
You need a certain amount of wealth in the country to be able to fund all this research and the US probably could afford it, but since were not going to use patents, taxpayers may become upset that a large portion of their tax dollars are going to foreign aid rather than domestic aid.