I can see their point, however. Overclocking for the sake of higher hashrates is not the same as overclocking for gameplay. Because this and other forums exist for more hashrate-specific overclocking advice, their banning of bitcoin talk isn't really hurting anyone's access to information.
However, it's bad marketing strategy on their part, if at all their interested in increasing their userbase.
And a conclusion is that all the @home type of projects will have a much harder time from now on. Bitcoin will suck out all their users.
I disagree. Maybe in the short term, this will happen, but at a certain point, when power costs equal earnings, bitcoin mining will become unfeasible and leave a lot of folks with a lot of overclocked hardware just itching for something worthwhile to do with it.
There's another, greater possibility as well, however. Bitcoin has the potential to be established as de-facto currency of processing power for other projects. It's already a currency representing processing time, after all, and that's why @home and SETI people are wetting their shorts, because there's a dollar value on what their members do for free.
While parallel processing projects that pay users are rare, it's not unprecedented. Folding@home, after all, is still an experiment. The day that a pharmaceutical company figures out how to make and share money on a similarly-designed project is coming soon. If at all they could pay people for slightly more than power costs, there would be a bitcoin-like gold rush to these research projects.
Terms for this future "dry biochemistry" have been bandied about for about a decade now. The far-off (100 year) goal is doing chemistry in an entire, perfectly-represented virtual cell. But that kind of scale is not necessary to enable the moment when an experiment is deemed "cheaper to do dry than wet". @Home, so far, is involving projects that can only feasibly be done via computers, rather than as a cheaper alternative to existing real world, wet, expensive, risky experimentation.
Or, to put it in another experimentation analogy: You don't use humans as your model organism when apes will do. You don't use apes when you could just as well use pigs. You don't use pigs when you can use rats. You don't use rats when you can use zebrafish. You don't use zebrafish when you can use flies. You don't use flies when you can use yeast. You don't use yeast when you can use e. coli. You don't use e. coli. when you can instead possibly use e. coli. with some luminescence genes to make pretty pretty colors, which you can use to spell "kick me" in bacteria on the lab coats of people you dislike.
And you don't use any of those if you could instead sit at your desk and pay a bunch of idiots with loads of graphics cards to do the experiment virtually while you snicker and play Portal 2 until your adviser notices.
