I don't expect this to happen at anytime soon, and don't want to debate whether it will/won't happen, but hypothetically if BTC dies/tanks, it gets too expensive to mine or individuals just plain get sick of BTC mining, what other options are there out there to make use of all this computer equipment people have purchased for Bitcoin mining?
I know of a few other distributed computing projects like Folding@Home, BOINC and even GIMPS (CPU Only I think?). All of these are volunteer and don't have any payback, other the prime searches having some possibility of getting a reward if you get lucky and find a new prime.
Does anyone know of any other distributed computing projects that all this mining gear could be put to good use for, volunteer or paid?
I know of a few other distributed computing projects like Folding@Home, BOINC and even GIMPS (CPU Only I think?). All of these are volunteer and don't have any payback, other the prime searches having some possibility of getting a reward if you get lucky and find a new prime.
Does anyone know of any other distributed computing projects that all this mining gear could be put to good use for, volunteer or paid?
I'd actually recommend that you NOT join any of the projects where your donating your electricity costs to the government or pharmaceutical houses unless you have the biopunk / astro gear to back it up to be able to gain actual merit from your work.
When my network connectivity is down, or it's too hot to run the mines at full blast, I normally work on various software projects (n-gram / n-body natural language processing projects), trying to get the Lux rendering engine to behave better on OpenCL. I was fiddling with the some of the SHA3 contestants in GPU but swapped that over to FPGA.
There's not a ton that's interesting that will benefit you directly unless you're ready to do a little programming. PyOpenCL may be a good place for you to start with this.
There's some decent paper tree dollah to be made using hashkill for lawyers in discovery if you find the right one. Physics modeling if you have any
I think there's still some black market 3d protein folding work out there as well, but it's been awhile since I've seen any offerings. Pays okay, but will pay off much better when the goals are achieved.
Oh, and there's quite a bit in the 2d art field, smart crop, rotate, watermarking of sales images.
That's all I got for ya off the top of my head.
I think the next thing I'll lend my GPU power toward is the Battlefield 3 project. 
