CureCoin.<p>From <a href="https://curecoin.net/knowledge-base/about-curecoin/what-is-curecoin/" rel="nofollow">https://curecoin.net/knowledge-base/about-curecoin/what-is-c...</a> :<p>> Curecoin allows owners of both ASIC and GPU/CPU hardware to earn. Curecoin puts ASICs to work at what they are good at–securing a blockchain, while it puts GPUs and CPUs to work with work items that can only be done on them–protein folding. While still having a secure blockchain, it supports, and thus is supported by, scientific research.<p>...<p>From "CureCoin Reaches #1 Ranking on Folding@home"
<a href="https://www.newswire.com/news/bio-research-loves-curecoin-gamers-and-speculators-to-overtake-1-team-19890448" rel="nofollow">https://www.newswire.com/news/bio-research-loves-curecoin-ga...</a> :<p>> As of the afternoon of August 29, 2017 (Eastern Time), the Curecoin Team 224497 earned the world's #1 rank on Stanford's Folding@home - a protein folding simulation Distributed Computing Network (DCN). In a little over 3 years, the team (including our merge-folding partners at Foldingcoin) collectively produced 160 billion points worth of molecular computations to support research in the areas of cancer, Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, Infectious Disease as well as helping scientists uncover new molecular dynamics through groundbreaking computational techniques.
From <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15843795" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15843795</a> :<p>> Gridcoin (Berkeley 2013) is built on Proof-of-Stake and Proof-of-Research. Gridcoin is used as payment for computing resources contributed to BOINC.<p>> I doubt that volatility would be welcome on the Gridcoin blockchain: Wikipedia lists "6.5% Inflation. 1.5% Interest + 5% Research Payments APR" under the Supply Growth infobox attribute.<p>> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridcoin" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridcoin</a>
Can we build such a blockchain, where instead of spending energy on calculating useless crypto hashes, miners actually solve parts of some gigantic distributed optimization problem? Let’s say fitting a NN to extract high-level concepts from all the internet data (and conquer the world).