If you can figure out how to coordinate their activities then probably a whole lot but this is a very hard problem. Just knowing how to write code or design web

If you can figure out how to coordinate their activities then probably a whole lot but this is a very hard problem. Just knowing how to write code or design web sites is the easy part. The hard part is picking a tractable problem and then getting enough people interested and motivated to work collectively towards a potential solution. Presumably cryptocurrency protocols are designed for precisely this purpose but I'm not aware of anyone that is using code to coordinate groups of people towards some objective other than accumulating as many points as possible in some imaginary economic game. So if there was a distributed protocol that was designed to align people on developing cancer therapies then that would be a legitimate and useful application of distributed consensus protocols.