Bitcoin software could prove at least as useful as the Bitcoin online peer-to-peer currency itself by underpinning a number of important new technologies:

• A form of “carbon dating” for digital information — something that would make electronic voting more secure,  because of the way Bitcoin records transactions.
• Namecoin, which uses modified Bitcoin software to provide decentralized domain names for websites, could be used to circumvent Internet censorship (as in SOPA/PIPA) by providing a P2P alternative to DNS servers.
• CommitCoin, end-to-end (E2E) cryptographic election verification using voter-verifiable, anonymized, ballot receipts.