Why should anyone really care about points? If you're doing any kind of DC for points than you have the wrong motives IMHO.

You are right, but there are such people.
When I realized that the BU project (and donate at home also) actually selling BOINC credits for BTC, I was shocked by the immorality of it.
This shock haven't passed.

For your information:
I've just sent the following letter to this mailing list:

The BitCoin Utopia phenomenon

I’m new to this list so this post could be a bit unusual, just as its subject.

We’re discussing this subject for two months on my main project’s forum, and Jacob Klein advised there that I should post my point of view to this list.

Currently there are two indices of the contribution:
1. Computational (Cobblestones)
2. Monetary (USD, EUR, …)

The computational index has two purpose:
1. to measure the throughput of a project, or a given set of projects
2. to motivate donors to support their chosen project(s)

The monetary contributions are handled separately by the projects.

BitCoin, and the BitCoin Utopia project linked these two indices together, as this project is awarding BOINC credits for BitCoins mined by the project’s participants.
The amount of BOINC credits awarded by the BU project is reduced on a regular basis as the hashing difficulty rises. This practice confirms this project’s commercial attitude, as otherwise the credits awarded should be in direct ratio with computational performance. Regardless of this practice the project made up an exchange rate between real world currencies and BOINC credits (it comes from the nature of this project), which is unprecedented. The current average exchange rate is about 130 million credits per USD. By pronouncing this exchange rate I’d like to express that this project raises much more severe questions than turning the stats’ sites upside down (however that event made most of us notice them).

The way of money donation before the BU project was the following:
1. the donor earns the money
2. the donor sends the money for the project
3. the project puts the donor’s name and the amount on their homepage.
In this case value moves only in one direction, so it’s a donation.

The way of money donation through the BU project is the following:
1. the donor earns (mines) money
2. the donor sends the money for the project
3. the project awards the donor BOINC credits for the mining.
4. the project takes its share, and sends the rest to the destination project
In this case value moves in both directions, so it’s commerce.

Fund raising is a very sensitive problem for every project, yet none of them sold BOINC credits to collect their funding, until the BU project showed up.
The problem of awarding BOINC credits for mining BitCoins is that the system awards the same thing twice: once for the donor who earns (mines) the money receives credit, second the project which receives the money.
To put it in another way: the award for mining is BitCoin itself, it shouldn’t be awarded again.
The present situation is unfair, as the real money donations are not rewarded like BitCoin donations (i.e. with credits).
The nature of the BU project caused a moral problem by merging BOINC credits with money.

Under the present credit system there are two ways of resolving the change the crypto currencies have brought:
1. accepting it, and let the other projects collect funding by rewarding money donations with BOINC credits
2. denying it, and forbid the BU project to award credits for mining money
If we accept it, then there should be some authority which sets the price of BOINC credits, which is a very difficult and debatable task.
I’m on the side of denying it, but it would be unfair to the participants of BU (and would induce harsh reaction) if the credits they’ve earned would be lost.
However, it would be fair to the other projects, if contributions made through the BU project would be kept in BTC, USD, EUR or whatever convertible currency, as BOINC credits are not such a thing.
In that way the participants of the BU (or any fund raising project) could easily check if the TCO of their mining equipment makes it profitable or not.

I think it wasn’t worth it to turn the cross project stats upside down in exchange of a couple of thousand USD, making years of CPU/GPU crunching look obsolete.
A temporarily solution could be reducing the amount of credits awarded by the BU project – regardless its computational capacity – to a level on which it doesn’t fool common crunchers by acting as the Holy Grail of BOINC.
From the replies on GPUGrid’s forum I can tell that the astronomical amount of BOINC credits the BU project awards made a lot of people blind, and it’s very hard for them to see the BU project as it is: fund raising – not science.
Should the BU project go like this in the long term, their impact could be even adverse on the overall scientific contribution of BOINC, as that much disparity in the awarded credits could make people to sell their expensive crunching hardware to buy more and more cheap hashing ASICs as they might think that they serve better the aim of BOINC when they earn more credits. This is not the same situation as when the GPU crunching caused similar credit shock as there’s much more aspects to consider. Some people think that the other projects could use these minig-ASICs in the future for their own (scientific) purpose.

On the other hand, I do appreciate BU’s effort in gathering funds.

Allowing the BU project to reward BOINC credits in exchange of monetary contributions was a fatal mistake, which couldn’t be seen in advance and it would be very hard to take back. Thus it made the reform of the BOINC credit system more urgent.

I would like to make an addition to the “generalized credit” proposal.
There should be a fifth kind of credit, which is money.
This is viable as a separate resource even for fund-raising projects, because they can’t use only one project defined credit to track the cumulated hashing done, and the total currency collected as the hashing difficulty is continuously rising. Besides, knowing the amount of money generated by others, new donors can make profitability calculations before purchasing and running mining equipment. (This is a very important factor in this case.)
If money would be the fifth resource it could help projects to build their own mining pool, leaving BU (and it’s share) out of the way of donating money.

Zoltan