I've only been mining a couple weeks now, but with two GPUs and two CPU threads going I've amassed some coinage.  I posted on a popular forum's distributed computing section what everyone thought of bitcoin and I've received some troubling replies.  The one that gets me the most (and the one that I can't seem to find an answer to) is this: just what is all this hashing for?  Is it really merely to find the next block, are we unknowingly cracking for some devious entity?  It would appear that they will not accept the former as an answer, even though they all run F@H and WCG clients and can't truly trace the math they are doing either.