Folding@Home is an initiative that uses computational power donated by people from their personal machines to help fight against cancer, the coronavirus and other various diseases. They're based in Washington and have partners such as Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Oracle (the java guys) and Avast (the free anti virus guys).
Put together all of this power makes for what would be one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, but it's not enough.
The science is just too advanced for us to understand currently. They need more power. While there are many people who donate power (often at the expense of their GPU), there aren't enough. In order to get people to donate, they need an incentive and this is where crypto comes in.
There are two schemes that I want to talk about from the crypto community where you can donate power and earn crypto. Firstly...
Bananominer
Years ago nano underwent a fork to produce the well known meme coin, banano. One way to earn some is through using folding@home. They compare the process to mining and say "instead of running arbitrary calculations to 'mine' a cryptocurrency, your computer runs protein fold simulations through Folding@Home to help scientists around the world fight diseases such as Alzheimers, Cancer, Parkin son's".
Currently 1 banano is worth around half a cent which isn't much but it's something. I've recently seen people doing this through AWS and they only lose small amounts of money while contributing greatly to research. The way the price is going, it may soon be more profitable. It's definitely a well established scheme at this point and if you're running a capable machine, I urge you to check it out.
Folding.cash
Folding.cash is a significantly newer scheme that I only found out about today. They reward users with SLP tokens (which run on the BCH blockchain) for donating spare power to the cause. While I don't know a lot about them yet and their website isn't all that detailed, they're definitely a project to look out for in the future and I'll update this post when I learn more.
Why you should donate.
While I understand not everyone can, donating to Folding@Home is something to consider if you have a powerful enough pc and can afford burning though your GPU just a bit faster. With schemes like these along with the happy feeling from contribution you manage to get some crypto back as a reward. It may also help to get us out of this pandemic faster so I think that’s one of the best incentives there are.
As always thanks for reading, hope you have a great day, and I'll see you sometime in the near future.
YES YES YES. I run the Banano.Miner and love it!