[eli]

Yes, that's my understanding. But it doesn't require that the tasks are "pointless" -- just that they are hard to compute, but relatively easy to verify.

There are lots of problems in bioinformatics and physics that are hard to compute and easily divided into chunks. Find one that also has easily verifiable results and you've got a pretty good candidate.

[jonprins]

But the problems being chunked up in bitcoins are the actual bitcoin transactions, thus churning them is not pointless. It strengthens the system.