Harnessing Computational Power used for Proof-of-Work in Block Chains I t's well known that proof-of-work carried out by miners to add a new block to the block chain requires lot of computation power. This power is used to find a hash value matching to some random value. The purpose is to make the block adding process exhaustive such that fraudulent behavior will be discouraged. I was wondering , perhaps in the future, that there will be a motivation to adapt a new kind of proof-of-work such that, the miner will be required to carry out a useful X amount of data processing tasks and provide the proof. Such a trend would open up the opportunity for the organizations/individuals to outsource their data processing tasks and issue a token of task completion? perhaps. An example to simply this idea is, those organizations wish to get their data processed, publish to a public queue and the miners will pull the jobs off to execute them, which would ultimately be published to a pr...