It would be really interesting if the organizers recorded and tracked the Bitcoins that are distributed in this way using the block chain. It could be a financial parallel to the MIT Reality Mining dataset: http://realitycommons.media.mit.edu/realitymining.html
Take a look at the contributor's stats for the Bitcoin project on GitHub: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/graphs/contributors Gavin Andresen, the lead developer for the project, has removed more lines than he has added.
http://www.quantabytes.com makes Bitcoin analysis simple. It's cool to work on because we know almost nothing about the structure of Bitcoin's block chain and how it is evolving over time.
Yes, if anything I'd imagine the Bitcoin price influences the mining difficulty. If a Bitcoin is worth more, miners can invest more in mining hardware, thereby increasing the difficulty.
