Joshua Smith is the founder of CureCoin, a cryptocurrency harnessing the power of the mining process as a massive distributed medical research tool. The self-taught programmer is based in Bay City, Michigan where he works remotely with collaborators around the world, like Dr. Pande, the founder of Stanford’s Folding@home, on an unofficial level.
We spoke with Smith about his initial motivation and inspiration for the project, getting support from businesses and charities, the fate of the network after the creation of a disease free world, his team’s groundbreaking innovations and much much more. The full interview follows below. There were already platforms such as Folding@home that use the power of the crowd to do scientific research. What do you see as the main innovation that CureCoin brings?
It brings a new incentive, and not just incentive, but a means to make participating in what used to be a donation system into a system that can actually make profit for people to host machines that help advance science.
Before CureCoin, people were just spending their own money to fold proteins on the computers, now they have a chance to recover those costs, enabling them to contribute even more. End goal is similar to any coin, to have enough competition that the price goes into the green (profitable area) to do this research.
Basically I view it as Folding@home was an engine sitting around already functioning, CureCoin in essence is a bolt on turbo charger to make it run faster.
In the first months that we launched, we broke every last world record in computational research speed, and other records not even involving medical research but raw flops. We were at about 19 petaflops (on the Stanford outdated calculator) which set our team faster than the IBM Titan super Computer, something never achieved by any […]
