Wow, this is really interesting.
As a small-time mining enthusiast I always wondered if the extra computing power that is being used to mine a cryptocurrency could be used to do something different instead than just raise the difficulty to keep the block-timer proportional.
Do you think it would be possible to assign an algorythm that let's miners "idle" during low transaction output but if "something big happens" or huge activity causes transactions to increase then it slowly starts working harder with the GPU/CPU software to keep that up? Or is that maybe a completely different field and the GPU usage is required for the hashes anyway.. I am not so technical I just like to imagine solutions to problems. :P
We have software for this now.