Auroracoin is a decentralised, peer-to-peer, and secure cryptocurrency released as an alternative to the Icelandic Króna to bypass governmental restrictions associated with the national fiat currency. It was launched with the aim of becoming the ‘official’ cryptocurrency of Iceland. AUR was a pioneer in the area of country-specific cryptocurrencies. AUR was launched on the 25th of January, 2014, by an anonymous developer who went by the pseudonym of Baldur Friggjar Óðinsson. It was originally based on Litecoin, using the Scrypt algorithm with a Proof of Work mechanism, but was later updated to use a multi-algorithm architecture in 2016, forked from DigiByte. Auroracoin uses the PoW consensus mechanism, which utilises device hashing power to solve a complex mathematical problem in order to authenticate a transaction proposed to be stored in the blockchain. The difficulty of solving the problem ensures that authenticating forged transactions is very difficult unless the attacker owns an impractically large chunk of the network’s total hashing power. AUR is one of the only cryptocurrencies to use a combination of five different hashing algorithms, namely Grøstl, Qubit, scrypt, SHA-256, and Skein. While initially very popular, Auroracoin has seen little to no activity for a while, with poor marketing, and frequent dev team changes. Reasons for little growth have been various, from slow adoption in Iceland, to developers leaving and joining the project midway. However, it is expected to not go lower than the recent low, and might see a rise as AUR plans to launch a more aggressive marketing campaign in Iceland to promote the coin among the masses. Unlike most other altcoins, Auroracoin has made extensive changes to the original codebase. It has introduced security measures such as Automatic checkpointing, and protecting against known flaws present in the BTC blockchain, such as 51% block replacement attacks.
Curecoin is a new SHA-256 based cryptocurrency with a big vision, that is - Curing Cancer, Alzheimer's, Huntington's, preventing viruses, and designing next-level of pharmaceuticals. Curecoin can be earned with both GPU and CPU. Folders use high-end GPUs and CPUs to fold proteins, earning a proportional amount of coins set-aside for their contributions. SHA-256 ASIC Miners could still get along by mining Curecoin as usual which will further secure the blockchain and the network. Whether you are heavily-invested in ASIC equipment or still have GPUs and CPUs, you can participate. Due to the nature of folding (diverse, constantly changing, not easily predictable), GPUs and CPUs will both always be relevant, so an investment in consumer hardware isn't wasted. Curecoins go to three main areas: Folders, Miners, and Developers. The folders get 76% of the total coins (80% of the coins distributed per day). SHA256 miners get 19% of the total coins (20% of the coins distributed per day). 2% of the total funds are distributed to people who donated to project development. The other 3% is dedicated to Curecoin developers, and will be used for paying for development costs (such as hiring professional programmers, paying for infrastructure, etc.), and for giving back to the community (folding hardware giveaways, faucets, covering 0% mining pools, etc.).