For me, knowing that folding@home have been around for a very long time gives me trust in them.
Because it pre-dates cryptocurrencies (by many years)? Honestly they're not new, fully reviewed, and no problems for about 2 decades. They're definitely more trustworthy than Microsoft or Apple IMO.
That's a perfectly viable alternative. But both are free... just not OSS. F@H isn't suspicious however... but I understand the concern.
Well, I meant freedom as in free speech, not as in free beer, but you get it. By being proprietary for no reasons, it is suspicious, though; you basically run something and you have no idea what it's not doing, mandating the use of a sandbox (which I'm sure 99% of people don't use).Because it pre-dates cryptocurrencies (by many years)? Honestly they're not new, fully reviewed, and no problems for about 2 decades. They're definitely more trustworthy than Microsoft or Apple IMO.
That's a perfectly viable alternative. But both are free... just not OSS. F@H isn't suspicious however... but I understand the concern.
On the other hand, since I don't care to release anything as FOSS myself - I also understand the other side as well.
Yep... just like Apple and Microsoft - which was why I mentioned them. Although depending on what drivers or 3rd party apps you're running... you can throw Linux in there as well. But I understand your reasoning and I applaud your dedication. To me the problems with privacy and security are far too massive and pervasive in the infrastructure itself to worry too much about established and well-governed non-profits who choose to keep their software closed-source. I'll worry about that when the NSA data-center closes down and we go at least 3 months without a serious CVE in a router, OS, or cloud service.
Folding@Home Reaches Exascale: 1,500,000,000,000,000,000 Operations Per Second for COVID-19
by Anton Shilov on March 26, 2020 6:00 AM EST
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Folding@home has announced that cumulative compute performance of systems participating in the project has exceeded 1.5 ExaFLOPS, or 1,500,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second. The level of performance currently available from Folding@home participants is by an order of magnitude higher than that of the world’s most powerful supercomputer.
Right now, cumulative performance of active CPUs and GPUs (which have returned Work Units within the last 50 days) participating in the Folding@home project exceeds 1,5 ExaFLOPS, which is 10 times faster than performance of IBM’s Summit supercomputer benchmarked for 148.6 PetaFLOPS. To get there, Folding@Home had to employ 4.63 million CPU cores as well as nearly 430 thousand GPUs. Considering the nature of distributed computing, not all CPU cores and GPUs are online at all times, so performance available for Folding@home projects varies depending on availability of hardware.
The outbreak of COVID-19 has been taxing for a number of computational biology and chemistry projects. IBM recently formed its COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium that pools together major supercomputers run by various research institutions and technology companies in the USA to run research simulations in epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling. Cumulative performance of supercomputers participating in IBM’s COVID-19 HPC Consortium is 330 PetaFLOPS.
You see it plenty in the metro areas as well... there are just a different set of problems. New equipment and better facilities sure, but good luck getting to see the doctor for more than about 5 minutes... and I say "doctor" but you're often lucky if it's a P.A.
At least until you're dropping thousands on an elective surgery... then they line up and give you flowers and chocolates. 
