The bitcoin protocol is an extremely important advancement as it solved the double spending[1] problem and can be used for all sorts of interesting community and business applications. Especially for systems used by organizations (e.g. DNS) that need to be public, uncensored and accessible from everyone (institutions, countries and individuals).

Here are just a few ideas: http://www.convalesco.org/#31

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Double-spending