Yeah, it is disappointing that nothing else is happening, like proteins being folded, cancer cured. 
I'm thinking though that more namecoin like projects will arise. (I'm not too hip so I don't know about them yet.) I'd like to see some way of doing the folding/seti@home type stuff with the bitcoin network (or rather people moving to it from bitcoin), a way in which people get paid for their work, but I'm not sure why that currency would have value. Saw mention of a possibility of piggybacking onto the bitcoin blockchain for security? for other *coins.
Like imagine there's an AI network, crunching away at finding better AI (sounds fishy but I'm just trying to summarize instead of spending 4 pages explaining). Maybe if the miners are getting paid in shares, like stock, that can be traded for btc. Like this AI company is going to use the power of the network to make really well-evolved stuff, and so is going to pay them to do it (in future dividends per share?), and the better it is, the better the company will be in the marketplace. Possibly some small percentage of the power of that network would go to finding hashes for their currency or distributing the payments a la bitcoin, but it would be a very small difficulty, and hopefully could somehow piggyback on something else just for the security.
But the point here is that the bitcoin network is amazingly powerful, and it could very well funnel a lot of that power into related projects, just because everyone's sort of actively involved--more likely to see it and go there, being on bitcoin, than if they were just sitting in their quiet house, watching hulu, oblivious. Which is where I was a month ago, with no hashing power. Now I have a gig. And I approximately multiplied my total instructions per second in this house by 1000. And possibly the decibels.
I'm thinking though that more namecoin like projects will arise. (I'm not too hip so I don't know about them yet.) I'd like to see some way of doing the folding/seti@home type stuff with the bitcoin network (or rather people moving to it from bitcoin), a way in which people get paid for their work, but I'm not sure why that currency would have value. Saw mention of a possibility of piggybacking onto the bitcoin blockchain for security? for other *coins.
Like imagine there's an AI network, crunching away at finding better AI (sounds fishy but I'm just trying to summarize instead of spending 4 pages explaining
). Maybe if the miners are getting paid in shares, like stock, that can be traded for btc. Like this AI company is going to use the power of the network to make really well-evolved stuff, and so is going to pay them to do it (in future dividends per share?), and the better it is, the better the company will be in the marketplace. Possibly some small percentage of the power of that network would go to finding hashes for their currency or distributing the payments a la bitcoin, but it would be a very small difficulty, and hopefully could somehow piggyback on something else just for the security.But the point here is that the bitcoin network is amazingly powerful, and it could very well funnel a lot of that power into related projects, just because everyone's sort of actively involved--more likely to see it and go there, being on bitcoin, than if they were just sitting in their quiet house, watching hulu, oblivious. Which is where I was a month ago, with no hashing power.
Now I have a gig. And I approximately multiplied my total instructions per second in this house by 1000. And possibly the decibels.