Scientific PoW Mining: Why Crypto Miners May Become the "Killers" of the New Coronavirus

The new coronavirus is still raging around the world, and all walks of life are actively participating in the fight against the epidemic. In the blockchain industry, the chain circle is actively developing related platforms to help trace the epidemic prevention materials on the chain; the mining circle, which has not found a "place to use its skills", has recently begun to take action to contribute computing power and find potential treatment solutions for the virus.

The project called Folding@home launched a collaborative program on March 15, allowing miners around the world to contribute their computing power to help simulate the dynamic changes of the new coronavirus protein and find potential treatments for the virus.

Could mining help find a cure for coronavirus?

In fact, Folding@home was officially launched on October 1, 2000. It is a distributed computing project that studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation and related diseases caused by them. It is hosted by the Pande group of the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University.

Viruses also contain proteins that suppress our immune system and reproduce themselves. To study the new coronavirus more deeply, we need to know how these viral proteins work and how to design therapies that can block them. There are many other experimental methods to determine protein structure. Although powerful, they can only show a single snapshot of the protein's everyday shape. Proteins have many moving parts. Folding@home's expertise is to use computer simulations to study the moving parts of proteins, thus capturing valuable information that cannot be accessed any other way.

In fact, Folding@home has launched many similar projects, not just the new coronavirus. For example, it has made considerable progress in fighting Ebola. Therefore, this action is likely to help find valuable treatment solutions for the new coronavirus, and it has also become a hot topic in the cryptocurrency mining circle.

However, understanding protein activity requires huge computing power to run simulation programs, so external forces are needed to help. After all, "many hands make light work." Pande's team said: "If we get 100,000 GPUs, the computing power will increase by 5-10 times."

Folding@home said in its official announcement on the coronavirus: Every simulation you run is like a lottery ticket. The more tickets we buy, the greater the chance of winning.

Obviously, PoW cryptocurrency mining pools will be ideal volunteers for the Folding@Home project. Under the PoW consensus mechanism, the blockchain's accounting rights are proportional to the computing power of the miner's node, that is, the stronger the computing power, the greater the probability of mining.

Although the early days of mining with the computing power of personal computers have passed, and the ASIC miners that monopolize Bitcoin computing power cannot participate, GPU mining equipment also has powerful computing power, and there are still many GPU miners on Ethereum, which will be a valuable resource for Folding@Home. You should know that Ethereum is basically the largest source of GPU computing power on the earth. At the same time, Bitcoin miners can also contribute computing power if they have idle old GPU mining equipment. Some small coin miners can also participate as long as they meet the requirements.

In addition, due to the recent stock and crypto market crash, the electricity cost of mining Bitcoin or Ethereum currently exceeds the revenue it can generate for small mining farms or private cryptocurrency miners, so many crypto miners have a lot of idle computing resources that can be invested in Folding@home activities.

Which blockchain projects are already involved?

Gregory Bowman, director of Folding@Home, revealed in a recent Reddit AMA that the project currently has 400,000 computers contributing to research. He said: "Before the coronavirus pandemic began, we already had about 30,000 users. In the past two weeks, 400,000 volunteers have joined Folding@Home." The number of Folding@Home donors has increased by 1,200% in four weeks. Currently, many projects in the upstream and downstream industries of cryptocurrency mining have joined this campaign against the coronavirus.

Coreweave, the largest Ethereum (ETH) miner in the United States, has transferred the computing power of about 6,000 GPUs. Coreweave's CTO estimated that the donated resources are equivalent to 0.2% of Ethereum's total computing power. These computing powers can earn 28 ETH per day in normal times. However, Coreweave does not care about these losses, but hopes that these GPU computing powers can help find a solution to the new coronavirus.

Brian Venturo, co-founder of Coreweave, said that when he first heard about the Folding@Home plan, he decided to support it without hesitation. In fact, they immediately built a test network and ran it within minutes. Coreweave has currently shared half of its computing power with the new coronavirus research.

F2pool, a small Bitcoin mining pool giant, has also spared no effort to promote this event in the community. Previously, F2pool tweeted: "Although ASIC miners cannot participate, any community member can use GPU to participate in mining. We recommend miners to take a look at the Folding@home event." Then it reposted Zcoin's tweet about soliciting idle computing resources and commented: "In this difficult period, we wholeheartedly support the transition from mining to 'folding'. You can join the Zcoin team. Our mining pool team participated in the Folding@home project. If you want us to share the event link, please get in touch with us."

Is scientific research PoW mining feasible?

Someone on Reddit proposed a bold idea to develop a cryptocurrency that can solve scientific research problems while mining.