Cryptografic currencys in future

[ajareselde]

All this ASIC talks got me thinking, after they come , whole playground will change, game will change, and only a hand few of speculators that are right will prosper.

But this isnt the only gamechanger, imagine when (in a few years time) all BTC is mined, where will we go, what will we do ?

If u think the market will be satisfied with ONE crypto coin; Better think again, all those GPU farms out there, all those supporters mining day after day with their precious gaming cards...
There will be "thirst for blood", "thirst for another" bitcoin.

I am in no doubt at all that BTC will be accepted like a paying value, but its not all there is to it, for we did not create bitcoins out of thin air, it costed us a small fortune to get all that equipment, and hell of a lot of time and patience, and therefor it MUST have a value.

There wasnt a timeframe like this since bitcoin started, for  now is the time of speculators and theorists. will our comunity sink or float?
By "us" i dont think of only bitcoin supporters, coz, as i said, i know bitcoin will survive, maybe even shine brighter than ever, but what will become of all us miners, seeking a different way of work,beliefs.. life .. ?

How far will the alt-chains last? Merge-mined will die out eventualy, atleast in a financial value means..

We are , or will be , in desperate need of a new "Meka" , a new project, and i dare say it that current alt-chains yet did not prooved themselfs as a lasting thing, not yet ..

[1715072656]

1715072656

[1715072656]

1715072656

[1715072656]

1715072656

[Etlase2]

Mining isn't a job bro, so don't treat it like one and you'll be just fine.

[smoothie]

All this ASIC talks got me thinking, after they come , whole playground will change, game will change, and only a hand few of speculators that are right will prosper.

But this isnt the only gamechanger, imagine when (in a few years time) all BTC is mined, where will we go, what will we do ?

If u think the market will be satisfied with ONE crypto coin; Better think again, all those GPU farms out there, all those supporters mining day after day with their precious gaming cards...
There will be "thirst for blood", "thirst for another" bitcoin.

I am in no doubt at all that BTC will be accepted like a paying value, but its not all there is to it, for we did not create bitcoins out of thin air, it costed us a small fortune to get all that equipment, and hell of a lot of time and patience, and therefor it MUST have a value.

There wasnt a timeframe like this since bitcoin started, for  now is the time of speculators and theorists. will our comunity sink or float?
By "us" i dont think of only bitcoin supporters, coz, as i said, i know bitcoin will survive, maybe even shine brighter than ever, but what will become of all us miners, seeking a different way of work,beliefs.. life .. ?

How far will the alt-chains last? Merge-mined will die out eventualy, atleast in a financial value means..

We are , or will be , in desperate need of a new "Meka" , a new project, and i dare say it that current alt-chains yet did not prooved themselfs as a lasting thing, not yet ..

Get your facts straight buddy. Mining bitcoin will go on for at least the next several decades. Not "just a few years".

[Paul Troon]

Another way to think about bitcoin mining is that whatever you "invest" in mining is actually an investment in a startup company, lets call it the "bitcoin financial network" or BFN Corporation.  It is as if you invested in a startup company that runs a financial network based on the bitcoin concept.

The coins you get are your shares of ownership in BFN Corp.  You can sell your shares immediately, or hold on to them and hope they increase in value as the network as a whole increases in value.

As more people mine, the total volume of investments (ie. hashes) increases and the value of the shares (ie. coins) received for the same investment (mining effort) decreases.   More widespread use and adoption of the network increases the value of each share/coin, which offsets the decrease in shares/coins received for some fixed investment of mining. 

If a serious technical flaw is found, or people stop using the bitcoin network en mass for some other reason, your shares/coins will lose most of their value - the equivalent to BFN Corp. going out of business.

If BFN Corp. ends up replacing Visa, Amex, Mastercard and the US Mint, then those shares you hold of BFN Corp. could become somewhat more valuable.

At this point in time a bitcoin is more than just a unit of account - for early adopters the coins they save are like pre-IPO shares in a nascent financial network.

But perhaps I'm off topic.  What do I see when I see the future of cryptographic currencies?  It's electric heating.  Room heaters will come with built-in wifi and be stuffed with liquid cooled ASICs.  The cost of heating your room will be offset slightly by the beer money that trickles in to your bitcoin account from each heater.  That's my utopian vision of a future where bitcoin wins, my dystopian vision of the future where bitcoin loses is well covered by George Orwell in his book.

[ajareselde]

Mining isn't a job bro, so don't treat it like one and you'll be just fine.

in 2 years i am mining i earned about 3.5 times more than with my day time job, so i definetly cosider it a job... bro
its addictive, u start with 300mh card and end up with 15gh farm..  not having to pay for electricity really boosted my earnings, but with those asics im troubled what to use my farm for now.

if difficulty realy goes in the sky, im sure aint gonna force my rigs if it doesnt pay even for maintenence, and im sure others wont also.

and about btc being all mined up, can anyone tell me please whats a calculated last block time?

thanks

[meebs]

Mining isn't a job bro, so don't treat it like one and you'll be just fine.

in 2 years i am mining i earned about 3.5 times more than with my day time job, so i definetly cosider it a job... bro
its addictive, u start with 300mh card and end up with 15gh farm..  not having to pay for electricity really boosted my earnings, but with those asics im troubled what to use my farm for now.

if difficulty realy goes in the sky, im sure aint gonna force my rigs if it doesnt pay even for maintenence, and im sure others wont also.

and about btc being all mined up, can anyone tell me please whats a calculated last block time?

thanks

there is no such thing as a "last block" it is just that the coins created by blocks slowly decreases over time.

[ajareselde]

Mining isn't a job bro, so don't treat it like one and you'll be just fine.

in 2 years i am mining i earned about 3.5 times more than with my day time job, so i definetly cosider it a job... bro
its addictive, u start with 300mh card and end up with 15gh farm..  not having to pay for electricity really boosted my earnings, but with those asics im troubled what to use my farm for now.

if difficulty realy goes in the sky, im sure aint gonna force my rigs if it doesnt pay even for maintenence, and im sure others wont also.

and about btc being all mined up, can anyone tell me please whats a calculated last block time?

thanks

there is no such thing as a "last block" it is just that the coins created by blocks slowly decreases over time.

lol i wasnt even aware of that, all this time i was thinking that there will be a last block.
i wonder what effect it will have on confirmations, coz it will probably be insane difficulty, and slow block solving

[Cranky4u]

Another way to think about bitcoin mining is that whatever you "invest" in mining is actually an investment in a startup company, lets call it the "bitcoin financial network" or BFN Corporation.  It is as if you invested in a startup company that runs a financial network based on the bitcoin concept.

When discussing my mining with a non-tech head friend lately, I stumbled across the analogy of BTC/LTC mining rigs simply being like a distributed main frame of a commercial bank. With the mining operations simply being the equivelent of processing the transactions. So as a processor, I get paid for how many transactions I can process for the banking mainframe.

My mate was very impressed with that answer and it made sense to him. Do others agree with this simplistic sales pitch?

[Cranky4u]

I think the extending confirmation time of BTC will eventually proove a stumbling block. I can envisage a time, say 5~10 years in the future, were blocks may take days to confirm. I think that this will drive BTC to be primarily high value transactions only as they will be very secure however people will not want to wait days for coonfirmations. This is were a faster currency, like LTC, can step in and fill the relatively rapid transaction space.

[smoothie]

I think the OP needs to get more educated on how bitcoin works and is designed to work for many years before trying to come to any "intelligent" conclusions about the future.

Start at the beginning and then once you are up to speed let's discuss.

Given your account was created mid 2011, I would have thought by now you would have had a better idea on how bitcoin works in the long-term.

 

[DeathAndTaxes]

I think the extending confirmation time of BTC will eventually proove a stumbling block. I can envisage a time, say 5~10 years in the future, were blocks may take days to confirm. I think that this will drive BTC to be primarily high value transactions only as they will be very secure however people will not want to wait days for coonfirmations. This is were a faster currency, like LTC, can step in and fill the relatively rapid transaction space.

In 5 to 10 years blocks will be every 10 minutes.  In 50 to 100 years if Bitcoin is still around blocks will be every 10 minutes.  Where do you get this idea that blocks will take longer and longer?

[canubis]

Miners will still be able to mine for bitcoins when all the bitcoins are mined. That is what transaction fees are for.

[pyra-proxy]

In 5 to 10 years blocks will be every 10 minutes.  In 50 to 100 years if Bitcoin is still around blocks will be every 10 minutes.  Where do you get this idea that blocks will take longer and longer?

How many transactions can be rolled into a single block?  In 100 years if Bitcoin does reach public acceptance couldn't it be seen that there could be too many transactions for single blocks to happen so you have to roll over to the next block etc. for the initial transaction?  **more a real question here about how the system works at this level**

[killerstorm]

How many transactions can be rolled into a single block? 

Currently size limit is 1 MiB, which is approximately 4000 250-byte transactions. So ~6.6 transactions per second. Half a million transactions per day.

Bitcoin protocol isn't set in stone. If there is demand block size can be increased. It's also possible to make it more scalable.

Changes like this need approval of majority of miners, but it is definitely doable.


There are cryptocurrency designs where each block pays 50 coins forever. It is not inflationary, contrary to common beliefs. (Asymptotically inflation is zero.) And in that case miners' rewards are going to be huge if they are supporting huge economy. IIRC Tenebrix was based on this approach.

I think this design is superior since miners won't have to strangle activity with fees.

[cunicula]

I think this design is superior since miners won't have to strangle activity with fees.

There is no free lunch. Security has to be supported somehow. You can pay for work by taxing spenders (txn fee), taxing savers (block reward), or some combination of both.

The focus should be on reducing the total tax burden through smarter security, not on shifting the tax burden from one group to another.

[killerstorm]

There is no free lunch. Security has to be supported somehow. You can pay for work by taxing spenders (txn fee), taxing savers (block reward), or some combination of both.

With system I described inflation after N yeas is 1/N. So it goes down to zero with time, and so does tax on savers.

However, if we assume that there is some coin loss (from lost wallets, mistakes, or maybe intentional part of design) monetary base is going to be stable.

So essentially miners do not take money by taxing savers, instead they replace lost coins.

On the other hand, if no new coins are produced and some coins are lost, savers will profit from doing nothing, which isn't healty.

[cunicula]

There is no free lunch. Security has to be supported somehow. You can pay for work by taxing spenders (txn fee), taxing savers (block reward), or some combination of both.

With system I described inflation after N yeas is 1/N. So it goes down to zero with time, and so does tax on savers.

However, if we assume that there is some coin loss (from lost wallets, mistakes, or maybe intentional part of design) monetary base is going to be stable.

So essentially miners do not take money by taxing savers, instead they replace lost coins.

On the other hand, if no new coins are produced and some coins are lost, savers will profit from doing nothing, which isn't healty.

Appreciation compensates savers for the possibility of loss. You would like to take this compensation away and distribute it to someone else. That is a tax.

To reiterate, the focus should be on reducing the need for taxation, not arguing about whose money to expropriate.

[El Cabron]

once asic there is ltc for the gpu farms.

[Sunny King]

There is no free lunch. Security has to be supported somehow. You can pay for work by taxing spenders (txn fee), taxing savers (block reward), or some combination of both.

The focus should be on reducing the total tax burden through smarter security, not on shifting the tax burden from one group to another.

Appreciation compensates savers for the possibility of loss. You would like to take this compensation away and distribute it to someone else. That is a tax.

To reiterate, the focus should be on reducing the need for taxation, not arguing about whose money to expropriate.

This is exactly what ppcoin project is trying to achieve, to demonstrate that work is not required to secure block chain, thus further reducing the cost burden on users of future cryptocurrencies.

J. Becker et al in a lengthy and possibly prejudiced paper 'Can We Afford Integrity by Proof-of-Work?' argued that Bitcoin is not affordable compared to existing infrastructure. I don't necessarily agree with that as Bitcoin may be affordable enough but high energy consumption is one of the very few legitimate criticisms on Bitcoin in my opinion.

[killerstorm]

Appreciation compensates savers for the possibility of loss.

Seriously? People who do not lose their savings are compensated for what sloppy users do?

This is anti-insurance.

You would like to take this compensation away and distribute it to someone else. That is a tax.

I don't think it's possible to take away something one never had.

You can as well call food prices "a tax on hunger" or something.

To reiterate, the focus should be on reducing the need for taxation, not arguing about whose money to expropriate.

This issues are orthogonal. We can argue about whose money to expropriate while trying to reduce the need for taxation.

This is exactly what ppcoin project is trying to achieve

Doesn't ppcoin incentivize mining with interest rate? Then it falls under "robbing savers" category.

[cunicula]

This issues are orthogonal. We can argue about whose money to expropriate while trying to reduce the need for taxation.

I don't think discussion about who to expropriate is useful. It is a complicated issue and rational arguments can be advanced for almost any position (see below).

Money is supposed to have two properties.

1) Cheap to use for exchange
2) Cheap to use as a store of value

If we have large txn fees, we are interfering with use (1). If we increase the money supply over time, then we are interfering with use (2).
If we have a good which satisfies properties (1) and (2) better than bitcoin, then this good should dominate bitcoin as a form of money.

So those are the reasons why we should avoid taxes. However, because of externalities, we can also make arguments in favor of taxes. Bitcoin has maintenance costs and these are related to user behavior.

Txns generate externalities. Txn has to be stored and transmitted by everyone else forever. This is costly. If people just sit on their coins, no data is generated. Therefore, txn taxes seem sensible in the bitcoin system.

Hoarding of coins generates an externality. All else equal, hoarding increases bitcoin market capitalization and therefore increases the economic motivation to destroy the bitcoin.
Accordingly, hoarding increases the need for security measures protecting bitcoin. Hoarders should pay the security costs that they impose on other bitcoin users. Therefore, taxes on hoarding are sensible in the bitcoin system.

[cunicula]

Doesn't ppcoin incentivize mining with interest rate? Then it falls under "robbing savers" category.

No. This is clearly wrong.

PPC coin "taxes" miners by printing coins. The burden of taxation is proportional to the amount of money saved. This would be like "robbing savers," but ...
PPC rewards miners by printing coins. The rewards are offered proportionally to the amount of money saved.

There is no net taxation at all.

[killerstorm]

No. This is clearly wrong.

PPC coin "taxes" miners by printing coins. The burden of taxation is proportional to the amount of money saved. This would be like "robbing savers," but ...
PPC rewards miners by printing coins. The rewards are offered proportionally to the amount of money saved.

There is no net taxation at all.

I didn't know you are so math-impaired. This is wrong on many levels...

1. It takes time to mine a share, likely a very significant time, like years. But prices will be adjusted continuously. So suppose in a year prices are 1% up, but you haven't mined your share yet. It is equivalent to losing 1%. So effectively it is equivalent to tax on spenders.

2. Furthermore, coin-age is reset after sending coins. So money which is in active circulation does not earn interest. So, again, it is a tax on spenders.

3. To mine you need your wallet to be attached to an active mining node. Which means that people who are using thin/mobile wallets simply won't be able to mine. Moreover, people who care about security of their coins will keep then in an offline wallet. So clearly people who can't/don't want to mine pay to people who are mining.

4. Mining has its costs. With ppcoin you'll need to expend resources all the time just to keep your money intact. So how is it different from taxation? You're just paying taxes with your hardware resources. And, no, you don't secure your money yourself since you'll be securing other people's transactions, and also resources which need to be spend is not proportional to money you own.

5. Mining has its costs. It is fundamentally unpossible to pay for it without paying for it. Thus if you want to reduce costs of spending/saving you have to invent more efficient transaction processing. For example, based on divide and conquer. Otherwise it is just about shifting costs around.

[killerstorm]

I don't think discussion about who to expropriate is useful.

I think discussion about reducing "tax" is useless unless you know some concrete scheme to do that. It is equivalent to working on scalability of Bitcoin.

Actually I've made some research on this matter. But it doesn't mean I can't write on other topics, right?

Txns generate externalities. Txn has to be stored and transmitted by everyone else forever. This is costly. If people just sit on their coins, no data is generated. Therefore, txn taxes seem sensible in the bitcoin system.

Hoarding of coins generates an externality. All else equal, hoarding increases bitcoin market capitalization and therefore increases the economic motivation to destroy the bitcoin.
Accordingly, hoarding increases the need for security measures protecting bitcoin. Hoarders should pay the security costs that they impose on other bitcoin users. Therefore, taxes on hoarding are sensible in the bitcoin system.

I think it would make sense if fees will be proportional to costs. E.g. for spending it is costs of sending data over network and doing lookup and ECDSA verification on all nodes. For hoarding it is cost of storage.

Even if storage was free, hoarders would still benefit from network security, so it makes sense to tax them. Although it's hard to quantify how much. Perhaps we can find some equilibrium here.

I think it would make sense if fee structure was transparent and fair, rather than arbitrary.

[cunicula]

Hmm...

I didn't know you are so math-impaired. This is wrong on many levels...

Let's just look at what you wrote that I was responding too.

[
Doesn't ppcoin incentivize mining with interest rate? Then it falls under "robbing savers" category.

And then at how you backed up your argument...

1. It takes time to mine a share, likely a very significant time, like years. But prices will be adjusted continuously. So suppose in a year prices are 1% up, but you haven't mined your share yet. It is equivalent to losing 1%. So effectively it is equivalent to tax on spenders.

2. Furthermore, coin-age is reset after sending coins. So money which is in active circulation does not earn interest. So, again, it is a tax on spenders.

Embarrassed yet?

[cunicula]

I don't think discussion about who to expropriate is useful.

I think discussion about reducing "tax" is useless unless you know some concrete scheme to do that. It is equivalent to working on scalability of Bitcoin.

The tax we have been talking about is txn fees per block (tax on spenders) + block reward (tax on savers)

Schemes which maintain security while simultaneously lowering this sum enhance security.

It is all about security and has no direct relationship with scalability.

[killerstorm]

Embarrassed yet?

Not really. It taxes both spenders and non-mining savers.

And even if I was wrong, that doesn't make you right.

[killerstorm]

The tax we have been talking about is txn fees per block (tax on spenders) + block reward (tax on savers)

Schemes which maintain security while simultaneously lowering this sum enhance security.

It is all about security and has no direct relationship with scalability.

If it's cheaper to mine tax can be reduced.

Think about it: tax = costs of mining.

[pyra-proxy]

I don't think discussion about who to expropriate is useful.

I think discussion about reducing "tax" is useless unless you know some concrete scheme to do that. It is equivalent to working on scalability of Bitcoin.

The tax we have been talking about is txn fees per block (tax on spenders) + block reward (tax on savers)

Schemes which maintain security while simultaneously lowering this sum enhance security.

It is all about security and has no direct relationship with scalability.

When did it become a bad thing to pay for services rendered?  That is what the tx fee is, I don't see that as a tax, which is an arbitrary confiscation of value for likely unrelated purposes to the commerce taking place.  The tx fee is not arbitrary and directly paying for the services of miners... with that said the tx fee in cryptocurrencies that have no upper cap on block rewards is not needed economically, sadly they are needed for security and health of the block chain itself, so devising a plan to overcome spam/block chain bloat in an uncapped currency while eliminating tx fees would make for a better system all around.  The next evolution would be a cryptocurrency that is unbounded while not having any effective inflation or deflation, this eliminates the effective "tax" on both creditors and debtors, as inflation is a "tax" on creditors (and savers usually) and deflation is a "tax" on debtors.

The "tax" on debtors is an easier fix by devising a negative interest rate system, thus you can have mild deflation and no "tax" burden on debtors.  Inflation or "tax" on creditors/savers is the harder one to solve because a positive interest rate system simply increases the burden of inflation and thus the effective "tax" on creditors/savers.

[killerstorm]

Not really. It taxes both spenders and non-mining savers.

Actually it's more subtle that this for ppcoin. Let's assume that cost of mining doesn't depend on size of a stake.

Then whether it makes sense to mine depends on size of a stake! E.g. if person has X coins and cost of mining per year is C, then it depends on whether (0.01 * X - C) is positive.

So bigger miners get bigger nominal net income out of mining, while small miners will be losing money on mining.

Also note that it is nominal income, we haven't taken inflation into account. With inflation real net value of mining might be negative!

So we get this:

• people with small quantities of money are taxed
• people with bigger quantities of money might make nominal profit, but still lose value
• people with large quantities of money actually make profit on mining

[cunicula]

1) You are ignoring financial intermediation. Smallholders who spend coins often can't mine effectively, but this doesn't mean they can't earn interest too.

Smallholders who want liquid accounts will put their money in online wallets. Wallet services will mine and pay out interest to depositers. The interest will likely be only slightly less than one would get from mining oneself. You are right that there will be a tax on spending, but it's going to be negligible.

2) Mining PPCoin doesn't work like you say it does.

You are paid 1% * coin-years. You can mine once a day, once a year, or once a decade and you still get the same interest rate. (There is an issue with compounding here, but it is negligible.)

[cunicula]

The tx fee is not arbitrary and directly paying for the services of miners...

The question is whether miners' security services could be provided without accompanying expenditures on equipment and electricity. If so, miners could be paid much less without any reduction in the quality of service received by their customers. If miners are paid less, inflation and/or txn fees can be reduced. This would make the currency more useful for everyone.

I recognize that this is not an issue most people think about. The fact that everyday users ignore future fee hikes comes from a subtlety of blockchain design.

tax on spends = (txn fees + block reward per day) / txn volume per day = (22   + 7200) / 177,079 = 4.1% [I think this is very much an underestimate, but cannot come up with better numbers.]

Users are effectively taxed 4% on each txn. But users ignore this because fees account for only 0.3% of the total tax burden.

Later txn fees replace inflation. Bitcion's competitiveness is largely based on its low fees. 4.1% isn't especially low, however. For bitcoin to succeed this number has to go way down.
I think 0.1% is a reasonable and achievable target.

That can only happen if proof-of-work is replaced with a more efficient security system. One which does not rely on continuous input of external resources.

5. Mining has its costs. It is fundamentally unpossible to pay for it without paying for it. Thus if you want to reduce costs of spending/saving you have to invent more efficient transaction processing. For example, based on divide and conquer. Otherwise it is just about shifting costs around.

Blah blah blah... prove that it is "fundamentally unpossible"

[Etlase2]

Blah blah blah... prove that it is "fundamentally unpossible"

You guys are arguing the same thing.

[killerstorm]

1) Smallholders who want liquid accounts will put their money in online wallets. Wallet services will mine and pay out interest to depositers. The interest will likely be only slightly less than one would get from mining oneself. You are right that there will be a tax on spending, but it's going to be negligible.

It is absolutely different thing in terms of security. Both for those small guys and for double-spends. (If you'll have large amounts of stake concentrated in hands of ewallet operators double-spending will be trivial.)

You know, I'd rather put my money into USD bank than into PPCoin ewallet. At least USD bank is regulated  and can pay some real interest. (Here where I live banks pay about 8% per year for deposits in USD...)

2) Mining PPCoin doesn't work like you say it does.

Oh, have you analyzed how it works? I did.

Consider a simplified scenarios where all stakes are of same size. Mining is essentially a lottery where chances to win are inversely proportional to number of stakes which are actively mined.

If number of actively mined stakes is large then chances to win in one round (after one block) are small.

E.g. suppose there are 52560 active stakes -- one for each block within one year time frame -- then it takes something like a year to win a stake if you check your stake each block.

If you do not check each block you have much lower chances. To the point where you'll die before you win in lottery. And at large time scales compounding starts to matter too.

And don't forget that to mine you need to download and verify blockchain... So you don't win that much from mining only from time to time.

[killerstorm]

The question is whether miners' security services could be provided without accompanying expenditures on equipment and electricity.

This is why I'm talking about divide-and-conquer optimizations...

That can only happen if proof-of-work is replaced with a more efficient security system.

It's not just proof-of-work, it is verifying inputs and ECDSA signatures, transferring data, storing blocks. With large amount of transactions this becomes a real problem.

5. Mining has its costs. It is fundamentally unpossible to pay for it without paying for it. Thus if you want to reduce costs of spending/saving you have to invent more efficient transaction processing. For example, based on divide and conquer. Otherwise it is just about shifting costs around.

Blah blah blah... prove that it is "fundamentally unpossible"

I mean that if there are costs associated with mining then somebody needs to pay for them.

So it is about reducing costs. Which is not only proof-of-work, but all of the other stuff.

[cunicula]

The question is whether miners' security services could be provided without accompanying expenditures on equipment and electricity.

This is why I'm talking about divide-and-conquer optimizations...

That can only happen if proof-of-work is replaced with a more efficient security system.

It's not just proof-of-work, it is verifying inputs and ECDSA signatures, transferring data, storing blocks. With large amount of transactions this becomes a real problem.

Verifying inputs, ECDSA singatures, transferring data, storing blocks, etc.  are technological problems. If computing power grows quickly enough, these problems are solved.
If computing power does not grow fast enough, more efficient uses of hardware will be needed and I'm pretty confident that they will be found. Using hardware more efficiently would make everyone involved better off. If you find ways of using hardware more efficiently, it will not be hard to convince people to adopt these problems. In sum, the problems either solves themselves, or people become highly motivated to solve them, and everyone else becomes highly motivated to adopt any solution they find.

Sorry if you feel like I am minimizing your contributions here. The above is not my area of expertise. I'm sure it is important stuff. I just feel like the developers have a handle on the above problems. I have confidence in this area.

Securing the blockchain is a political problem. Growth in computing power doesn't matter in any significant way for blockchain security. The game is determined by allocation of voting power and rewards for voting. Altering voting rules and rewards creates winners and losers, and this creates conflict. Even if a superb solution is found, it will be very difficult to coordinate adoption of that solution. Identifying a good solution is not a rewarding endeavor. For the most part, it creates conflict and pisses people off. Adoption of a bad solution early on will have a persistent negative effect on long-run outcomes (hysteresis). Solving a problem like this from the beginning is very important. Adoption of a bad solution, like that in bitcoin, is damning. I think that makes this a pressing issue.

I don't think bitcoin developers have a handle on this issue at all. Slowly removing block rewards and waiting to see whether the blockchain survives is not a viable plan. 'wait and see' will eventually blow up in their face. For the same reason, I am against the gradual introduction of proof-of-stake in PPC. The proof is in the pudding. If you plan to secure the blockchain long-term using mechanism A, then put mechanism A in place now and show that it works. Otherwise, why should I trust it. Particularly when game theory suggests that it is not likely to work at all.