Were not there other ways to fix this issue?

For example, if the problem is PoW difficulty gets too low, why not set a minimum difficulty for PoW mining?

Or, do not allow two PoW blocks in a row.  Enforce that a least one PoS block is between each PoW block?

I think those fixes might be better than to just eliminating PoW altogether.  Just trying to understand this better.

Hey Guys, what did you expect the IRS to do?  Did you expect this:

"We, the IRS, tax everything one can make a profit on, except bitcoin, because..., because..., it's bitcoin!  And we love bitcoin and bitcoin users!"

It was never going to happen, not even a possibility.  Banning bitcoin was a possibility and it's off the table.  That's actually great news.

Now, in reality, people will pay taxes on bitcoin when they are provided a 1099 from somebody like coinbase.  I doubt anybody will get 1099's for small bitcoin purchases and so won't pay taxes nor get caught for it.  It's not unlike selling your car for more than you paid for it.  Very few people report that profit to the IRS and yet, by law, they are supposed to.  Nobody gets caught for this either.  The IRS looks the other way unless the person is a car dealer or running some other business.  How about barter.  Do you pay taxes on things you barter?  You are supposed to but not very many people do and not very many people get caught either.  And so it will be with bitcoin.

Worked fine for me.  I uninstalled the 32-bit version of 0.8.6 then installed the 64-bit version of 0.9.0 on a Win7 system after backing up my wallet, of course.  When I ran the new version everything just worked like I had never done anything.  That was a pleasant surprise since, as a general rule, this is not my normal experience with upgrading software.  The site does say to uninstall the old software first.  Maybe that's the trick, and if you don't, bad things happen.  Just speculating but that would be my guess.