the real reason is that learning the technicals of blockchain is not time sensative enough to have its own full year course of. the only complex part is the cryptography. the rest can be learned in just a few hours. its more of something people would learn at 'nightschool' or other short course term places if done officially.. heck, i see local libraries offer 'coding clubs' to kids who can learn this stuff and just use rewrote cryptography functions to take in one variable and hand out another.. so yea even kids can learn it in a few hours.

take for instance the thousands of altcoins being created, people learned real quick without the support of university tutors

these days programming, data security, and ai are the 'in' thing. but these are more for the computer science and information technology titles. where as computer engineering is more so for those that want to know about hardware and how data interacts with hardware

i dont think there would ever be a major in blockchains. as there isnt a major in relationship databases/microsoft access. and those have been around for decades.. they are just normally a topic taught as part of a larger major

nah network administration is more about setting up physical networks that are fixed. like cabling servers together, and how to remote access pc's to maintain them. you know administrating a network.
blockchains whole purpose is that there is no network admin.

bitcoins distributed network is independant computers that are peer-to-peer. meaning all you care about is connecting to the computer next to yours, not having to worry about the whole network.
most people simply learn how to program a script that can ip connect to another pc and send a message. as thats basically all you need to really care about if you simpllfy down what blockchains do

id say software development would rank as a high requirement along with cryptography.. and things like network administration and machine learning nearer the bottom.

machine learning can be fun and definetly the next tech industry just beginning, as a secondary career direction but for blockchain specifics which are financial related. thats usually best where the code sets the rules and sticks to them and doesnt try self learning new things, because each peer would be running off in different directions and causing chaos to any financial based blockchain

cryptography/encryption is key
everything else about blockchain is childs play/pre college level stuff

oh we have another comedian. hmm but thats an old joke i heard that experiment joke before.

an experiment is a test, waiting for a result, whereby when the test is over something else can be tested and no harm done. whereby its not the solution but just a game/playing around trying to look for something.

sorry but bitcoin is not a test. not an experiment. its an actual thing that exist and is being used by common people every day.

the reason your joke is old is because the punchline is that the developers want to do what they want and if it fails they want to walk away as if they done nothing wrong.

seems the last two comedians are reading from the reddit jokebook circa 2014. i think its time they update their material

gotta love that comedy.
so developers say no to developing onchain scaling.. sniff sniff, smells like they are censoring community needs/desires
technically it is possible, but politically devs just say no with some lame trumpesq excuses
'2015: hard drives will fill up fast if we had 2mb'
'2015: we want segwit and it will use 4mb bloat but not achieve 4x scaling, dont worry hard drives will be fine'

so developer fan boys pretending it will centralise the network,.. sniff sniff, dang that smell is getting stronger
sorry but bitcoin runs on a raspbery pi which is a multitude x slower than a standard computer. thus standard computers can handle more. so dont even try to re-start the myth of 'servers'

windy, did you not forget the censorship of 2017 that threw people off the network for not complying to cores demands.

time for you to add 'censorship' to the list or things you need to independently research.
but i will say this, you are a comedian. your comments make me laugh often. but thats no excuse, as even comedians research the topics they want to joke about

i guess the OP forgot the 2007/8 regulated financial crisis, and why bitcoin was invented.
here is a quote from the genesis block as a subtle reminder.

'Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks '

also to note, people do not actually understand what regulations do/are.
most regulators actually ask businesses to create their own policy handbook to self restrain themselves from immoral actions.
this is why some businesses never see a court room because they contract themselves and/or their customers into seeking recourse through hidden meetings, tribunals, arbitrations. businesses set themselves up as entities with no authority owner, thus if crap does hit the pan, there are no humans held liable and only some business setup insurance policy, which usually whn businesses want to crap the pan on purpose, leave the insurance dry of funds/lapse

regulators are not so much police investigating businesses and punishing them in the name of the normal people. instead they are just office dwellers waiting to see if anyone reports a business for breaking a rule which the business had some hand in creating in the first place.

regulators are not sherrifs. they prefer to restain the normal people from doing certain things while letting businesses do as they please as long as it dosnt get reported. and knowing businesses have NDA contracts with thier employees and also now that whistleblowers get in more trouble than a reported businesses ceo, regulations do not help anyone.

regulations are not there to protect the common man. but just some gold laminated registration number that some business paid alot of money to get certified. kind of like kindergardeners with a golden sticker on their shirt saying 'teachers pet'
done so it appears they are official and above board, while secretly getting upto mischief behind peoples back.

just remember to ask yourself, how many bank ceo's are doing prison time due to 2007/8

situation not solved.
you threw in lots of techno babble. but in short. if 1 GPU/cpu/system can create a possible block solution, even if the problem changes/randomly picked. someone will just buy 100,000 gpu's and have each system broadcast through different ip addresses(proxies) to appear as individuals. that way he has 100,000 more chances than some hobbyist with 1 pc

one thing to remember is in digital tech, anything can be replicated/multiplied/cloned.
the reason people havnt bothered(emphasis) to make an asic that emulates an individual algos method of problem solving an alt. is because the alt is not popular, dominant, bas enough value to even bother trying. its not because its technically impossible. its just not worth their time developing because the altcoins real world usage just isnt really existant

its like lotteries planned that only 1 person gets rich each week. even if the decided a system where face recognition, payment method and only allowing 1 ticket person was implemented. then what is known as syndicating would occur. where a group of people have an individual ticket each but if on of them won, they would share the award

in short you will never find a way that a whole population/community has equal oppertunity. there is always a way to game the system.

so now the stake is paid for altcoin..
on this closed ledger within the multisig group(factory) those 35 managing the ledger, multisig can collude. meaning they set what happens to funds.

again you keep forgetting in a closed blockchain managed by 35 full nodes they have full control of the alt chain and also what happens to the funds of the multisig.

also. you said initial coin distribution of xxx. so are you now misdirecting from a private chain within a colluding group and instead being some mass public chain outside the group of 35... i ask this because if you want a mass public chain. there is already one, its called btc. plus having a mass public chain defeats the topics proposal

if your only talking about a private chain within the group. then the group set the rules and there is no way to make the group lose stake because they are the ones evaluating the rules and auditing thier data so they can just claim the real btc when it broadcasts back to btc chain by pretending nothing nasty occured on THEIR private chain

even in the lightning network the rules are in flux as 2 people connecting together can set their own rules for what happens between them..

.. im starting to think your not trying to solve something lightning related. but just be another public altcoin creator where people have to buy your altcoin to get in. yea i picked up on your premine. and i picked up on your 'spend bitcoin to get xxx'.

pruning does not help the user as a full network helper
first you still need to download the entire blockchain first and then the node sets itself to only keep the latest few days/weeks of blocks and deletes the rest.
thus making the whole point of even bothering to download the blockchain useless waste of time. might aswell just be a litenode and have a utxo snapshot.
also pruned nodes dont have the blockchain so they wont then be seeders to help others. thus just being a selfish leacher and sitting on the relay network while not helping the network fully.
its one of th stupid things i thought core devs added as a feature of their FULL NODE implementation because they are not full nodes if they cannot be a seed for others to download from.
so yea if you dont wanna be a seed and dont want peers grabbing data from you. just dont bother trying to be a full node and use a lite node instead

of course they are not new... dang.. research harder.
the whole point of blockchain is not about the distributed database. its not about the contents and rules of validating each pice of data insid a block/database
 its about while having a distributed database, checking that everyone has the same thing. and done so very simply.
by announcing the latest block hash, which if all other locations have the same hash. means everyone has the exact same data. so simple

block hashes have other uses too. such as if hashes dont match. checking the previous hash, and then the previous hash to the point where they do match. and then coming back one block where it didnt match, to then see whats been changed.
makes it childs play to find out who or whats been changed without having to check every entry inside every block

however if it was just some single file database with a single hash that changes at a periodic time(traditional database). then the only thing a database would have is the latest EDIT and unable to see when things started to change

many companies keep backups of previous instances of a traditional database for that solution. but trying to compare each instance and find out when a change occured is harder and more of a manual task. plus the storage of such is much higher

imagine the data required for every 10minute instance change of the 'bank balance'/UTXOset, a back up was done. yep backing up bitcoins utxoset each time it changes is 3gb extra, which needs storing every 10 minutes. this is far worse if you add up 10 years of it.
3gb x 500,000 instances =15petabytes
yep if bitcoin didnt have a blockchain and just had the utxo set and auditors want a way to check the history and find out when changes happened on certain instances. it would require 15 petabytes and alot of manual checking.. yet blockchain does it all and at a cost after 10 years of under 200gb.. while by default offering all the easy validation, auditing and whatnot built in

the purpose of LN factories is so that users dont need to be full nodes and just be litewallets, api calling the factory to check session validity, open/close sessions. where the factory checks close sessions, agregates the funds and re-assigns new offchain tx's to use for peoples new channels all without touching the btc blockchain.
bold part below shows you know there is a separate power dynamic going on

but i really do have to laugh when you said 'All the BTC in this network are from users other than these nodes'
by the stake being customer funds. then the fund managers lose nothing, as its not them having to put up and funds

the stake is contained and used in the factory multisig.. used on the ledger of the factory.... not the btc chain
as noted aswell by charging a fee the fund managers have signature authority to add such a fee..
by the factory managers being in control, it doesnt matter where the funds came from. it matter who gave the customer the deposit address.. thus again by it being the funds manager owning the ledger and handing out the deposit addresses. the customers are at risk of not getting funds back. because they are stuck at the whims of the factory

.. imagine it like using paypal. but paypal said:
'customers please deposit a security premium used as a penalty if we defraud you. oh by the way we control and hold the funds and we do the record keeping and the accounts and give you access to atleast let you think your playing with real funds
yep millipaldollars in our ntwork are not real dollars. so if we defraud you, were taking the insurance premium too..'.. not only was i laughing that you suggest users who are already at the whims of 3rd party pay the stake, not only laughed that you knew the 3rd party had control of the ledger and all transactions separate to users access. but also that you didnt consider that users would not like to pay fee's just for some 3rd party to hold funds.. and thats before even going into the technicals of PoS

what the OP seems to be offering is a way to create a distributable ledger within the concept of an LN factory(small group of multisig linked funds managers)

issues with PoS is simple. for this group to even agree to become a factory, means thy are already colluding..
by already colluding and their sidechain ledger is solely theirs (100% in their hands) so whats the point of stake.. its not like they can lose it. as they control the entire chain and where the stake goes

they might aswell just have a 30 of 35multisig and just sign each block with that, no stake required

the actual assumevalid and assumeutxo idea above is not good protocol for actually validating every transaction from genesis till now. and has many flaws such as sybil attacks by someone using a bitcoin fork could slide their chain in if the checkpoints matched(the fork of differing blocks occured after checkpoint).

EG imagine an assumevalid/utxo checkpoint was done chosen for 2016. yes all transactions and blockhashes match so sniffing peers results would pass the test that everyone has the same hash result. but the transactions after which your then independently testing wont. and thats where things get problematic.

EG someone can fork btc into a private network, start making their own blocks at a lower hashrate. and then have some specially designed sybil nodes. that sniff out new users and filling up their 8 node connections with 8 sybil nodes. thus controlling everything the user gets and sees.

separately
.. the actual issue people have is not that it takes them 4 weeks to download. but that their node is stuck with a 'downloading blockchain' message and no other function until the blockchain is uptodate.

this is where the blockchain should be downloaded as normal validating EVERY transaction and block since genesis. but where instead of waiting and twiddling thumbs doing nothing for 4 weeks, the node can grab a snapshot of a UTXOset quick, so that people can just get on and transact. and then they wont notice the real blockchain stuff going on as it becomes a hidden background thing not interrupting their plans

for those not wanting to be part of the network as a seed for other to download from them ('the cries of bandwidth costs of doing so') then can just forget being fullnodes and just be litenodes and just grab a utxo snapshot

as for concerns about spending funds where a person accidentality gets a bad UTXO set.. well thats what the relay network and miners mempool is for. to reject invalid transactions......

an approach to ensure your getting a good set is by having it where you are trying to download from 1000 different peers.. but makes you a bad 'leacher' in download terms. which is why most devs agree that its best to only do it via 8-10 peers.. but these 8-10 peers could be sybil nodes and when doing hash checks you would obviously get the same results as they are the only peers your connected to.
what some have suggested is to allow 1000 connections to random peers. not to download the blockchain. but to have more scope of the hash checks to make sure what your getting from the 8-10 peers is good data. rathr than just hash checking with the very same people that gave you the data

people still check coinmarketcap for bitcoin dominance.... dang[facepalm]

can someone please just create a altcoin aready that has 5trilion coins premined and just do one trade for $1. to create a coinmarktcap stat of $5trill for the alt. just to show that the 'market cap' is a meaningless number

yes folks, market caps are meaningless. bitcoin does not have $144billion in fiat stored away somewhere
yes folks, market caps are meaningless. someone can create a $5trillion cap for the cost of just $1

when will people learn

dollar trade wars been going on for decades, centuries even, weak economy been going on since 2008... come on atleast try a bit better and stay relevant to this year

how about all those futures options that expired last year, people put into another yearly contract which they are now closing those contracts.(meaning something relevant to the last 12 months)

how about all those hashrate chatter causing people to panic because its not supporting a good bottom floor value line support(2 month floor puts btc at a ~$7k cost to mine).. in short the $10k price was inflated/bubble and not 'good value'

how about people now trying to register with brokers to use things like bakkt instead of buying direct thus less buyers and more sellers on the exchanges.

anyways. if you want to stick to the decade view of causes, here is the best one.
bitcoin has and will always be volatile like a stormy sea. with waves going up and down. dont expect a perpetual tidal wave growing constantly bigger and bigger. dont expect smooth sailing. always expect ups and downs

yes you are correct. just having a PRICE does not mean it has a store of VALUE. but again no one would exchange something that had no value, EG would you exchange your house for a jelly baby... no. because you dont value the jellybaby as much as the house.

i have a bag of dogs mess. just becaus i put a $10 price tag on it, doesnt mean the dogs mess is valued at $10

as for price vs value. they are not the same thing.
this is the most biggest thing people do not realise.
bitcoins price of $8000 at the moment is not its value

some that are used to gold investing know the spot PRICE is not  the gold value

the pizza thing was 2 pizzas for like 20k coins. so like $30 for 20k btc = 1btc=$0.0015 that was the price not the value.
value is the amount once you take away all the wishy washy stuff and get to the bare bones bottomline of it.. not th high, profitable price someone can charge
over simplified, its like the minimum the price has been in the last month would be the value, as no one wants to sell below it, so everyones agreeing they value it at such in that period.. where as the top/ATH price for the last month is not its value

in retail, the recommended retail price is not the value. the price is not the value, but the value is a discount or last low price it has been recently..
too many people foolishly think a price chart is a value, which is where they get confused and see last week bitcoin was $10k and is now $8k and think it lost alot of value. when infact the value could have always been this low and now the price is at value making it a very good price to buy at.

i personally have not treated the PRICE as value. i have done maths on mining costs and also the long term MINIMUM the coin sold for in a period and treated that as the value line

for instance in summer 2018 the PRICE went way above $6k. but i treated the value as being $5.8k before the autumn dip due to cheaper mining. so yea during summer when people were stupidly saying its gaining and losing value when it was above $6k i was still settled with valuing it at $5.8k and when the prices got close to $5.8k i said it was a good value price, and when it was way higher i said it was an inflated not so good valued price

from my maths of many years .. for btc to have a STABLE VALUE of $16k+, $29k+, $56k+, $87k+
the cost of mining it needs to be up near those area's.

no one can predict the rare one time spikes of hype speculation ATH price points. as they are random and speculative.

so ignoring random spikes of speculation to cause a rare event of a ATH reaching the number.. and instead think about the underlying VALUE where the price refuses to go below a certain point bcause its stable VALUE is atleast the number.. involves having the majority of the community not wanting to sell below that point. which is done over time of not being able to offer cheaper prices via mining and via the majority of traders already selling off cheap where the new buyers set their limits at new levels.

think of it this way. if people can profitably mine. they wouldnt buy coins but instead invest into mining and sell a portion of the rewards to get returns and keep the profits. by there being less buyers and more sellers the price wont rise.
this is why when mining cost just a few $100's but the price spikd to over $1000 in 2013 it didnt last long. hense why we should ignore stats about temporary spikes.

but to have the stable point where prices dont go below say $16k. it has to be a time where majority of traders refuse to sell for less and mining is not profitable to sell for less. thus giving a nice $16k resistance.
my research into this stuff has shown that the hashrate needs to near double todays rate just to give good support for a $16k value

being a medium of exchange of value. and being a medium of exchange are talking about two different things.
one being physically able to pass to different owners. and the other being the desire to accept is as a payment for goods or services.

the main smart community know to be a medium of exchange of value for goods and services means that it first needs to have value.

take for instance 2009-2010.
bitcoin functionally could pass between owners. but no one valued it at any $ value. it wasnt until it started costing people money to mine it and someone wanted a pizza for it that it then became a medium of exchange of value for goods and services... because guess what. someone put a value to it and another person agreed it was worth a couple pizzas for that and then the exchange for goods and services started

pools cant change the main rules. they would get their blocks rejected. they can only choose what transactions get included or excluded.
in short they could black list certain transactions formats or addresses, but not change the rules
try to learn about the risks before trying to pretend a algo change is needed. it just seems like your real intention is a 'get rich quick for free' option.. the flaw in that, which others have also noted is that if there was a get rich quick for free, everyone would be doing it and the end result is no one wins. thus coming back to your original problem. where you will ned to actually do something to get something. which is part of life


cpu mining any better? oh wait you hear the cries that 'AMD and Intel own mining'
GPU mining any better? oh wait you hear the cries that 'AMDati, Nvidia and Intel own mining'
no matter what mining is done. ther will always be cries blaming the hardware manufacturer for being king.

PoS mining.. oh wait you hear the cries where people pool/syndicate their funds into stake and that raises the minimal stake threshold to then not let the little people have a chance.

in short no matter what people try, if there is profit to b made people will try anything and everything to get more. leaving some people with less

and many make several speculations and delete the ones that ar wrong so that the only ones visible are the ones that showed correct guesses, making it appear they are right more often than not. where reality is that they were wrong more often, but removed the wrong evidence

anyways my main point is dont trust people speculating the future based on TA where T=just a chart with a Trend line