Are there any papers about practical (slash nefarious) uses one could make from the work put into the blockchain? I had the same thoughts as you recently, but don't have the background to imagine what's possible.
Each miner includes their own address and a nonce value in the work they are doing. Most of the work that goes into mining is generating failed hashes and is discarded by the client. Assuming a lack of mathematical attacks on sha 256, there isn't really anything nefarious to do with the published blocks.
