> Protein folding almost certainly has large optimization problem, an attacker likely could find ways to increase his mining power by orders of magnitude.
As you mentioned, this is a good thing. And as far as the effects on the currency go, this doesn't seem any different from Bitcoin miners moving from CPUs to GPUs to ASICs.
> If the currency became valueable, it is inevitable that someone would make solving this problem constant time.
Protein folding / structure prediction is NP-complete, so seems unlikely.
As you mentioned, this is a good thing. And as far as the effects on the currency go, this doesn't seem any different from Bitcoin miners moving from CPUs to GPUs to ASICs.
> If the currency became valueable, it is inevitable that someone would make solving this problem constant time.
Protein folding / structure prediction is NP-complete, so seems unlikely.