Real quick, this forum does not allow me to post a lot of responses, so I encourage everyone to email me rross@foldingcoin.net or join in the discussion here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=781352.0 but i will still answer as often as this forum allows me to per day :)
The miners are there for a reason. Looking at the Counterparty protocol you will see that since the CP assets live inside the individual BTC transactions, that unless the miners verify the transaction to be accepted, then the assets will work in the same way that BTC does and not go through.
You didn't really address why you think the miners are there for a reason, you just asserted it.
Realistically, what you have done here is made a centralized currency in which you issue new coins for yourself then we trust you donate the coins to protein folding.
We can already donate to protein folding with Bitcoin so I don't see much use in making an altcoin that does it in a less useful way.
The miners are there because Counterparty assets are built inside of the bitcoin blockchain. So without the miners hashing the blockchain, the transactions for CP assets (FLDC) will not go through.
As for why not just donate to standford? You absolutely could and i am sure they would love that :) But we are trying to harness the 330 PetaFLOPS of CPU and GPU computational power used in the other altcoins. So by giving an incentive to fold to the miners, the hopes are they will move over to folding, rather than hashing at blockchains that in many cases die off or get abandoned.
The miners are there for a reason. Looking at the Counterparty protocol you will see that since the CP assets live inside the individual BTC transactions, that unless the miners verify the transaction to be accepted, then the assets will work in the same way that BTC does and not go through.