Sorry to bug all of you.

As many of you no doubt know, crypto-currencies, primarily Bitcoin have become relatively popular recently. I am not about to argue about why or what they are, for the purposes of this question, that is largely irrelevant.

The reason I am here is that in thinking about crypto-currencies, I realized that there is a large amount of computing power being used to "mine" a currency that is essentially going to waste. There have been some efforts (primecoin) to fuse the mining function of these currencies into doing something useful (in prime coin's case, finding prime numbers) but for the most part, these are just one trick ponies.

Anyways the more I thought about it, the more I realized that you could easily combine the mining functions of a crypto-currency with the computing needs of BOINC. I am not talking about creating a new BOINC coin or anything. Just creating an addon to BOINC which uses pre-existing crypto-currencies as a financial incentive to for people to lend their computer processing power to your projects.

Essentially what I envision would be agnostic towards any particular crypto-currency. This what I wrote in a forum about Ripple (one of these types of coins):

a.) Companies would buy XRP's or Bitcoins or Litecoins or whatever on the open market (from individuals, or Opencoin, or hypothetically Mt Gox, Bitstamp, Coinbase whatever).
b.) That company or organization would then write a BOINC program
c.) Each company would control how many crypto coins would be paid out after every time results come back. They could also turn off or restart their node/algorithm, or add more or reduce the amount of XRPs they are giving away in the cue. They would also be able to determine how much work was needed for a payout.
d.) It would make sense if coin payouts worked more like a slot machine than a fixed amount for processing time. Bitcoin miners talk about the "need" for mining, but really they are just slots-jockies looking for a fix.

I don't know how hard it is for people who are interested in Grid Computing to organize teams and recruit new people to lend their computers. Probably some projects are more popular than others. This would be a way to encourage a whole new level of participation.

Anyway I was going to try to write some coding to do try and do this, but frankly as a coder I am completely out of my depth. So I though I would throw post the idea here, to maybe inspire someone.

The forum where I started talking about this is here if anybody is interested:

https://xrptalk.org/topic/239-me-talking-out-my-ass-about-xrp-consensus/

Your link requires login info. Thus anyone wanting to read your further discussion would need to join that page. I will pass. However, I'm not fully sure I understand what you are proposing. Are you suggesting that companies pay their BOINC contributors with Bitcoins? If so, this would be possible but would also get a lot of criticism from the BOINC community. Perhaps explaining your idea a little further in detail. Also, keep in mind that not all BOINC users are familiar with Bitcoins and how they operate. You may even be interested in looking here for ideas and support. http://www.bitcoinutopia.com/