Thanks!

Don't have one personally, though people seem to be getting a smidg above 310K PPD on average with them. 280x's seem to get around ~150k-160k. The Maxwell architecture is known for being great on power consumption--so I wouldn't be surprised if it used half the power of a 280x. Pascal also looks exciting for GPGPU work, with a purported 10x performance in deep learning. Pascal is going to be based on a 16nm process, which makes leaps and bounds of energy efficiency and performance over the 28-nm process of the 7xx and 9xx cards. Rumors speculate they'll be out early Q2 of 2016.

Each certificate can only be used for mining one block, and specifies which block can be mined, which is always the current block, assuming the certificate authority is on the correct chain. When a certificate is used to mine a block, the certificate is included in the block, so anyone on the network can read it. Unreleased certificates would be possible to make, but as soon as a block was made with one of them, they'd have to be made public for the network to accept the block, so they'd have to be released.

Yeah, centralization is hard to define. Is Bitcoin centralized because the majority of users would install an update pushed by the devs without reviewing the code personally? Centralization vs decentralization is truly a gradient--A service like PayPal could be made where you need to digitally decrypt your own payment info with a passkey that only the user provably holds, which would be considered less 'centralized'.

I suppose a reasonable, practical definition of centralization is the measure of the negative or undesirable impact one party could exert on the network or service at will. Curecoin is certainly more centralized than Bitcoin and other similar derivatives, a tradeoff that comes with allowing one party or several parties control the work done for the proof-of-work scheme, rather than it being simple hashes.

The largest centralization (ignoring one development party, running on only one technology for data dissemination, etc. that is shares with nearly all other cryptos) comes in from the ability for trusted institutes to issue these certificates. In theory, such an institute could generate certificates for themselves that look realistic, mine with them, and redeem the coins. The certificates themselves would be public, but the pseudo-anonymity of Curecoin could make them difficult for people to tell apart from legitimate certificates. There does have to be some level of trust between the network's users and the certificate authorities, however the network will (although likely not at initial release) allow the network to vote (based on balance) against institutes. Voting an institute off the network would require a lot of community support and cooperation, and we're still playing with the numbers, but would be possible in the event that an institution was caught and proven to be forging certificates for themselves. Such an analysis of institutes for up-right behavior might involve comparing production numbers to large-sample probability of mining and finding a significant discrepancy, or a whistle-blower inside of the institute.

The network will become less and less dependent on a specific DCN (F@H, GPUGrid, etc.) as more are added, and each represents a smaller slice of the mintage pie.

Will Curecoin prove to be sufficiently distributed to appeal to the crypto community? We believe so, and we've received some great feedback at both the Chicago and Miami Bitcoin conferences. Lots of people at the booths brought up good ideas, proposed mechanisms for network protection and attack mitigation, some of which have worked their way into the code currently available for public alpha testing.

Curecoin will certainly NOT appeal to people with specific needs or desires, such as extreme decentralization, identity masking, end-to-end encryption, etc. That being said, it does offer some network-security advantages over other cryptos, namely Merkle Signatures to resist Quantum Computer attacks (implemented in Alpha, go ahead and play around with 'em!), and network blocks tied to certificates, which makes forking extremely difficult.

I know I'm getting off-topic, but I believe this deserves to be brought up in a discussion on centralization/decentralization, because ultimately the interest is in network integrity, for cryptos. Due to the layering requirements of blocks from different certificate authorities (dictated by an algorithm still in development, but basically rejecting blocks that stack certificates from the same authority, so blocks 288, 289, 290, and 291 couldn't all be from F@H), and the fact that certificate authorities will only sign certificates for the current (or 1-2 blocks into the future, if they're at their maximum consecutive stack) would make forking the network extremely hard. Even a certificate-authority hell-bent on destroying the network would be unable to fork back more than three blocks, and forking more than 9 blocks would require compromising three certificate authorities simultaneously, and acquiring all data needed for signing certificates. As this should never happen on the network, the reference client won't fork back more than 10 blocks under ANY circumstances except a manual intervention by the end-user, which shouldn't ever be required due to the structure of the network. So while the network is more vulnerable to the creation of Curecoins that aren't deserved, it is (in theory) far more resistant to attacks which compromise the movement of money around the network. Even if you could build a farm with 1,000,000,000 GPUs and fold proteins millions of times faster than everyone else combined, that wouldn't allow you to manipulate the block generation in any meaningful way. Once a coin got 4 confirms, it'd be very safe, and once it got 10, it's there to stay.

While not technically true based on the definition of a checkpoint, the network behaves as if every block more than 10 blocks old is checkpointed. That number might change as we play with the network math during alpha/beta testing, but the concept stays.

Does this mean that standford will be endorsing CC2.0 by providing certificates or will that be handled by the CC team still?

The goal is for Folding@Home/Pande Labs to sign the certificates, though due to their team-agnostic approach, we doubt it'll be easy to convince them to do so.

We're looking at getting other DCNs on-board before the 2.0 official launch, on the condition that they sign certificates, and we bring in this large network of computing power to their research. Since F@H already has the Curecoin team (and gets large amounts of computational power from other people) we have far less bargaining power.

So, if Folding@Home agrees to sign certificates, then the Curecoin developers will be completely hands-off the certificate process (which makes our job a helluva lot easier). If not, we'll sign the certificates based on F@H stats in a provably-fair way (posting all certificates publicly, and anyone can verify that the proportions of certificate nonces assigned to each user correspond to their daily production). We'll do some time-release mechanism so there's not a flood of certificates every hour.

Additionally, in any event, the Curecoin team does have the ability to sign certificates and "mine" them to keep the network going--but any blocks mined with our certificates don't generate any coins, they just keep transactions flowing on the network in the event that the network is becoming extremely slow or (especially in the early days with only a few DCNs) some kind of large outage causes the block generation time to dip FAR below what it should be.

Each CA has a different block reward (although some may have the same amount, there's nothing that forces them to), so when a CA is added to the network, their block reward is hard-coded. Over time, this reward can be changed by community consensus. The Curecoin Developer's CA has a block reward of zero, and will be used to mine those 0 coins to an impossible address anyway.

What do you want the conf file to do?

When you say you got nothing, do you mean the page didn't load, or you haven't gotten any coins yet? It can take a bit over 24 hours from your first WU submission (when you upload a WU that your machine completed) until it is counted and paid for by our system. If you submitted a WU over 24 hours ago, give me your folding username and I can look up the stats

Is Curecoin POS also?  Think I'm doing something....dunno yet.  Downloaded wallet, joined team, entered all info, registered, and the computers getting hot....so, guess something is happeneing!

Yup, Curecoin is PoS.

You can check with a program like MSi AfterBurner to see if your GPUs are working

So its a Folding coin affiliate?

I always liked this idea and am a Folding coin supporter.

CureCoin was the original Folding@Home coin, and it was announced in November of 2013. 

Foldingcoin came out the next year as a completely unnecessary imitator that people can merge mine and then dump for nothing.