The whole thing is based on Gridcoin and BOINC anyway, so the good thing that comes out of it is that BOINC research projects like Rosetta@home get more computing power for free.
For this the suchflex guys earn Gridcoins, which they can sell directly on the market and convert to money. But a user could leave out the middleman alltogether and just mine Gridcoins (or alternatively other cryptocurrency but for that you need ASICS) themselves.
This consists of two different parts, the first is just mining cryptocurrencies, but for that you need ASICS in order to be competitive.
The second part is based on Gridcoin, a cryptocurrency that rewards BOINC computations in a decentralized way. So you do all kind of BOINC projects like SETI@home, Rosetta@home (folding proteins),... and the newly generated coins by inflation get distributed according to research done by each user. Again, the important part is that there is no central authority giving out the coins, but each client queries the Boinc projects individually to find out how much research each user has done and the clients then come to a consensus about this, which is stored in the blockchain and is then the basis for the reward each client gets when staking the next time.
Suchflex is basically just a platform built on top of the Gridcoin platform for these "earn money by doing research" projects and simple cryptocurrency mining on the other hand.
There are alternatives, Proof of Stake for example, or gridcoin, where the computing power to "mine" gridcoin goes towards scientific projects via BOINC.
1) if the BOINC project servers were down then gridcoin would continue to function as a normal PoS coin and when they are online again you get the PoR bonus again
2) I think the BOINC foundation is very trustworthy and the advantages of contrubuting to science outweigh the disadvantages. Also BOINC itself is totally independent from gridcoin and well financed on its own for the public good of citizens contributing their computing power to science, so if they would tinker with the stats they lose their credibility and this would have consequences for them, eg. loss of fundingg or another team being funded to run the project servers, the software is open source anyway.
yes that is correct, the currency itself is decentraliced but the amount how much you mine additionally ("Proof of Research") depends on the BOINC project servers.
There is also Proof of Stake to secure the network, which does not waste electricity as much and on top of that the amount of stake you get for each vote to secure the network could also be made dependent on the amount of work you do for a science project as measured by BOINC.
The identification of which user gets what amount of "Proof of research" bonus is done via hashed BOINC email, as the email in BOINC is private and cannot be accessed by others.
It's not cryptocurrency stocks but real world stocks, so yes you might argue about the benefit of these but there's certainly already a lot of money being made in this area.
But yes as of now all supported projects are science projects.
There is already such a currency, it is called gridcoin.
The network consensus is reached by Proof of Stake instead of Proof of work, so no computational cycles are "wasted" on proof of work. But how much stake you get with is also determined by the amount of research you contribute to the BOINC group gridcoin relative to the total research done in this group. See further details there:
So there is two ways to mine gridcoin: with the normal proof of stake, which means you get an interest rate whenever you use your votes to secure the network and an additional "proof of research" bonus that you get with the stakes and that depends on your relative contribution to the gridcoin-BOINC team: http://boincstats.com/en/stats/-1/team/detail/118094994/over...
There are certain projects whitelisted, folding@home is one of them but there are many more.
What makes this even more interesting is the idea of commercial BOINC projects. As soon as you have a system where the inflation/money printing process depends on the computation power given to BOINC, BOINC projects to forecast stocks, AI, general machine learning tasks.. could also be created. Then this would be the first currency that has internal value, because the money in the inflation process does not come out of thin air but is based on computing power that is either used for science or for computing projects that deliever value.
Then again, this could also be done without the additional comission by just running Gridcoin.