Home->Getting Started->FAQ

(Updated April 30, 2019)

Panadcoinfah - Frequently Asked Questions

1. What does the community earn from this project?

The satisfaction of helping promote Panadcoin, giving to others, and helping scientific research in the fight against diseases that have made humanity suffer far too long. Our folding efforts are competing against many others and our team's success will attract the attention of others to Panadcoin and Folding @ Home.

2. What is the current position of the Pandafolders team?

Pandafolders broke the top 100 rank of all teams and never looked back! We now have a ticker in the top left corner of the home page that automatically updates and links to more detailed statistics.

3. What about the rewarding system?

We have an automated reward system that pays out the current donation and sponsor amounts once per week, late Saturday CST, usually beginning at 9 PM. The automated system collects the folding points for each Pandafolders team member (team #234317) with a valid Panadcoin wallet address as a folding user name. The reward amount is a combination of different rewards, some proportional to your percentage of the team's folding points for the week and some base on other things like simple participation. The white box on the home page titled "This week's payout" attempts to keep an updated list of rewards for the current week.

Rewards are funded by donations from shibes like you! Sponsorship by contributing a donation each week can have a lasting impact! See the sponsorship page for information about the options we have to help you to donate regularly in several ways.

4. Where did the Panadcoin Fah idea come from?

Many people wanted to get Panadcoin involved in Folding @ Home and several people tossed around the idea of rewarding folders with Panadcoins. Jahus created a Humble Panda campaign and along with thedude1693, a team, cause, and donation drive were created. Many helped along the way and when the goal of 1 million Pandacoins was collected, we celebrated. Time passed as the challenge of fairly distributing the donations sunk in. SoCo_cpp reached out and began development of a payment system. We began automated payouts with test donation funds until the system matured. Then the 1 million Panadcoins were distributed over many months. Other sources of funding have came and gone, but long term sponsors and user donations continue to keep PanadcoinFah going today.

5. What hardware can I use to fold?

You can fold with either your CPU, your GPU (AMD and nVidia brand graphics cards), or both. Graphic cards fold faster, but the difference with CPU folding is not as noticeable as with crypt-currency mining.

You can also fold with your CPU at the same time you GPU mine crypto-currencies or you can fold with both your CPU and GPU at the same time as you mine crypto-currencies with an ASIC.

6. Can I fold with my ASIC?

No. ASICs are specifically made to generate cryptographic hashes using specific algorithms such as Scrypt and SHA256. Folding consists of mathematical operations to simulate protein behavior and that has nothing to do with cryptography hashes or common crypto-currency proof of work algorithms.

7. Is folding labor intensive on the computer?

This depends on the hardware and configured folding power. Folding seems to be much easier on your hardware than mining. The Control interface allows you to set your folding power from light, to medium, to full.

Typically you won't notice a slow down of your computer with CPU/GPU mining and can even watch video such as YouTube while GPU mining. Some really old CPUs, like Intel i3 or older, may lag slightly if folding at full power. Folding @ Home detects when you are using the computer and tries to scale back work until the computer is idle.

When GPU mining, full screen games and applications that require exclusive access to the GPU may not work properly. You can always use the Folding @ Home control program or web interface to lower your folding power or pause your folding work if you need full performance from your machine. Just be sure to remember to un-pause it when your done!

Unless you are folding at full power you likely won't generate much heat. Yet, you should take care that your system is properly cooled by regularly blowing the dust out of your heat sinks, fans, and video card and check that your system has good airflow. If folding with a laptop, be sure not to cover the cooling vent and take extra precautions to prevent overheating. If you have an older system, are folding with a laptop, or are going to fold at full power, you might want to find a temperature monitoring program for you CPU/GPU to gauge how mining effects your system.

8. How does the automated system work?

The automated system is an open source LAMP web application created by SoCo_cpp. It polls our team's folding statistics from Folding @ Home's API and compares each team member's total points to the previous week to calculate each folders' reward. RPC calls to a Pandacoin client make the week's payout in one big transaction and transparent payout statistics are updated automatically to the website.

9. How can I tell how much I'm folding and will get rewarded?

You can't know for sure how much you might get rewarded, but by knowing how many points you will have made this week, you can make some guesses based on recent payouts.

You can view information about your current folding points from Folding @ Home's web-stats, or more detailed analytic statistics from Extreme Overclocking.

PandacoinFah's Payout History page gives very detailed information about recent payouts and the Payout Chart page charts trends in points folded, Pandacoins paid, and the amount of folders paid.