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"Silicon is Perishable": With all of the computing power perishing, I wonder if outdated hardware could be bought on the cheap and used for some non-financial projects. Could this become a boon for malaria research, SETI, or some of the other non-profit research programs out there?

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Bitcoin ASICs aren't reprogrammable to perform other computations -- the hardware (at least the really fast part of it) isn't Turing-complete.

People have speculated about whether other kinds of computational problems can be represented as Bitcoin hash searches but I think the answer is pretty clearly no, because the computations involved are so specialized.

OK, so pre-existing general computational problems likely cannot benefit. But if someone were to design a new system with carte-blanche, what constraints on that system's design would still allow them to exploit all this mining hardware? Put another way, what designs are to be avoided, lest an army of re-purposed hardware be launched against them? For instance, is SHA256 slightly weakened because brute-force is orders of magnitude less difficult now, than it would have been sans specialised BTC hardware?

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