cautiously optimistic

I made a big withdrawal to bank the night before it went down which still hasn't arrived, but at least I can log in now.

while I doubt bitcoin itself is doing anything else but crunching out bitcoin blocks, this does raise an interesting possibility.

Imagine a mining pool where you need to run custom software
that custom sofware makes your mining rig fold proteins or do some SETI stuff or whatever. For each unit of work you do, they give you some bitcoins.

They'd have to buy the bitcoins + do the effort of writing that software, but it might be cheaper then renting a HPC cluster.