What does this have to do with cryptocurrencies/cryptoassets? It's almost a decade older than Bitcoin. The inspiration (SETI@Home) is even older.

I think parent is advocating doing folding@home over stuff like PoW crypto since the former advances science and the latter (handwaves vaguely) doesn't.

Unless someone manages to turn out a hash collision or an all-zeros hash (spoiler: they won’t), there is absolutely no scientific value in the PoW process itself. (Whether the resulting cryptocurrency has scientific value is left as an exercise to the reader).