This is a high level academic discussion. I applaud it and wish we all could lift ourselves up to such a level.
I'm starting to become more Smooth-level bearish on the ability to create beneficial decentralized coins for a few reasons:
Smooth didn't inform me he had become so bearish. Is this why he apparently backed off his Monero/PoW dogma and joined Steem's DPoS marketing experiment? I am thinking (in addition to the effect of earning $10 million for doing nothing but mine a stealthmine at minimal cost+effort), that smooth is interested in any experiment that can popularize block chains and find a wide-scale use case for them.
1) The subject I was talking about where any succesful cryptocurrency will have standardized alias systems, and the government will create their own alias system scaffolding and force everyone to route transactions through it, making whatever you do in the base layer pointless because you will end up with governmentcoin no matter what.
2) The re-realization about what Ted Kaczynski said about technology being a net negative for freedom and how that inevitably applies to cryptocurrency (see above example)
I rebutted that in your observer thread.
3) The fact that any open loop system will always be bottlenecked by the centralized fabs such as TSMC, Global Foundries, Samsung, and Intel. This means no matter what you do, you will always have the equivalent of four "pools".
Not with my design.
4) The problem that the inherent value of the blockchain is entirely derived from the ability of everyone who uses the currency being able to mine it, because the main purpose of PoW is to create a decentralized exchange. You remove the decentralized exchange aspect and you have nothing. This is why things like defeating ASICs is important, yet maybe impossible.
DEX can be done another way, not only via mining. See the "cut and choose" discussion I participated in Bitcoin Technical Discussion forum with TierNolan and jl777.
5) The ability for people to do things like mine silver will always be far more accesible in the end game than any cryptocurrency, meaning the superior altcoin everyone is trying to create already exists in the real world and it's called silver.
I emphatically disagree! Bloggers are earning CC tokens right now on Steemit with 5 second signup.
Btw, for readers who don't know it, silver is often mined nearer to the surface of the earth than gold, thus is more accessible to individuals.
6) As I stated before, the best example of an optimal currency that isn't just an instrument of debt or IOU would be "energon" from the transformers cartoon - blocks of energy that can be redeemed at full face value at any time regardless of externalities. This is why in lieu of such a system, the world converged on the oil dollar. The ideal currency will always have metastability, the ability to do work. Without such high metastibility, the world would converge on just blocks of scarce matter, since matter is also energy, and that's where you get gold and silver.
The electrical power consumption of PoW block chains should become miniscule relative to the transacted value. That is a very fundamental and key factoid. I am sure Charles knows that or is paying attention to my point.
7) Once you read the above statement, the fact that we are dumping energy into cryptocurrency instead of extracing it to do work really makes you scratch your head.
Incorrect. We are extracting much more energy in the form of transactional value and network effects.
