This is a breakoff from this thread:
you want the feds off your back?
Treat bitcoins like Silver and not gold.
Silver is used as currency AND x-ray machines AND parts for your electronics AND solar panels... etc...
Gold is just a currency for the most part.
If we had bitcoins used for 4000 differing things, like DRM or whatever.. it would completely diffuse why people use bitcoins into a much wider pool... it also would solidify the fact that bitcoins are a commodity not a currency... and hence completely sidesteps many of the issues that we are running into (and will run into).
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.696154
Volia, 2 days later....
Clark and his colleague Aleksander Essex at the University of Waterloo, also in Ontario, realised they could convert a message - for example, a list of codes that securely link voters to their votes - into a Bitcoin address. Sending a tiny fraction of a bitcoin - a small transaction - to that address would allow the holder of that list to store it in the public record without revealing its contents. When they later publish the message for verification, anyone can repeat the conversion to a Bitcoin address and confirm its age by checking the public record.
Faking Bitcoin's public record would be very difficult as you'd need more computing power than the rest of the Bitcoin network combined - a feature that ensures the currency's security.
The pair have used their method, known as CommitCoin, to close a loophole in a voting system they helped develop. In the Scantegrity system, voters receive a confirmation code from the list that is cryptographically linked to their selected candidate and can be used to check on the election website that their vote is counted.
Now, if an unscrupulous election official tries to change votes they would be outed, because the code used to record the vote would change, and would not match up with the BitCoin network entry. "CommitCoin allows you to not trust anyone," says Clark.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328476.500-bitcoin-online-currency-gets-new-job-in-web-security.html