Makes me wonder if someone can create a cryptocurrency where the mining is for distributed computing research for achieving nuclear fusion power. Crypto-mining that does SETI@home/BOINC work.

This has been wondered for years, usually by people who don't know the purpose of hashing functions. If nuclear fusion models + protein folding were easily verifiable, then there would be no point in leveraging distributed computing for them - we'd have the same level of understanding for them as we do for contrived hashing functions. If they somehow also ended up with the difficulty directionality intentionally designed for in cryptography, then that would be fine. But that is pretty unlikely, and in that event your currency is totally hacked and useless.

It's still nice to dream of all this distributed computing activity going towards tangible real world benefits.

Like a global realtime financial network that grants participants complete freedom to do as they please with their own money? Yeah.

Every single word of that description is intangible.

So is "free energy" and "cancer cure". Of course Bitcoin's intangibility has tangible benefits this very second, those others do not.

Nuclear reactions and chemical formulas are technically tangible.

uh huh, but their tangibility has as much to do with randomly modeling them as a proof of work in a crypto currency - as every potential tangible thing you can spend the currency on. That is to say: none.

Physics is more tangible than mathematics.

ah, I see the problem now. You should open with that line in all your exchanges, you'd get fewer people trying to explain to you how you're wrong.

Actually, the proof of work exists.

https://xkcd.com/435/

It exists, it's called GridCoin. It's a proof of stake currency that is distributed based on work units completed in BOINC. https://gridcoin.us/