Random question (which I am sure has been asked before): is there any way to harness the power of the block-chain to, say, fold proteins? Or something "useful" like that.

I'm not saying that securing the block-chain isn't useful in and of itself, I'm just wondering if we could sort of set up the block-chain to swap in/out problems that are "hard to solve easy to verify and also provide other benefits to humanity". Example: say we swap the current proof of work with a protein folding problem instead, and then when we've "folded all the proteins" (or just decide it isn't a useful problem or whatever) in the future, we just revert it back to the current proof of work. Then maybe we find other similar problems and we could swap them in and out as needed.

I'm guessing the current miners are hyper optimized for whatever the current proof of work is, which would be the main road block (outrage at a "wasted" investment into sha-256 specific machines).

I'm not really up to date on all the tech / politics that would go into a change like that, but curious if it were technically possible.