In any case, the only practical value I see in bitcoin is as a transactional system.
WELL NO SHIT? bitcoin is all about transactionsI am sufficiently experienced to recognize that in the worst case a black box behavioral emulation of bitcoin as a transactional system could be built, perhaps out of as little as hamster wheels and rubber bands, perhaps more. Decentralized distributed data models are very common, there are many solutions to maintaining coherency in them. So on and so on. Yawn, been there, done that.
so it's ok to think centralized, but it's not ok to think decentralized? weren't you the one asking people to think outside the ox? 
A really good way to not get sucked into the paradigms of a given tool set is to start with requirements. Rather than retype the work of others, I would suggest you take at look, FOR EXAMPLE ( just like BOINC is an EXAMPLE, you dingbat ) at this refined set of proposed requirements posted elsewhere on this forum:
bionic "credits" are more for show than anything else. even then, it relies on a central server to keep tally.Too funny! Ok, sonny, I won't trot out the string of degrees I have in mathematics, economics, and law. I won't cite my 30 years of experience in the financial services industry with 20 of that on Wall Street. I won't even discuss my role as one of the earliest implementors of the RSA cryptosystem in that industry. All that was a long time ago, I would pay people to do that stuff for me now had I not done so well as to be out of it completely. None of that is relevant in a world born yesterday.
I would like to see references to that. inb4 you ragequit because you think it's not worth your precious time. when really, you're just afraid of losing.