Yeah, I'm using PoW-based "DDOS defense mechanism" for a current project and had this thought too. I briefly looked into what it would take to exploit PoW to do

Yeah, I'm using PoW-based "DDOS defense mechanism" for a current project and had this thought too. I briefly looked into what it would take to exploit PoW to do something economically valuable like folding@home, and it looked a bit tricky. At first glance, these sort of projects seem a bit unsuitable for real-time PoW because they were designed to be run on desktops and so tend to do things in large batches. There probably are other use-cases that could be more suitable though. Might be worth chucking that thought into Astra, especially if someone springs the $$$ money for it?