One part of this that I'm very curious about is what people generally consider to a "fair" method of creating the coins.
I don't like POW because it consumes too much and I think it's inherently susceptible to centralization. But w/o POW in the beginning, how to create the initial coins and transit to POS ? Can anybody suggest any other consensus making algorithms other than POW or POS ?
I do think that having a fixed quantity is good, even if there is a rising supply asymptotically approaching some final value.
How about this:
10% of the initial total supply is created in the genesis block. It is controlled by one person, let us call him StudMan, who will dole it out thereafter according to his opaque and arbitrary process. However, the intent shall be to pass this out to other developers and early adopters as payment for services rendered. I'm thinking 100 early adopters would be a reasonable quantity to get the party started. One wrinkle is that the initial coins held by StudMan cannot be used for staking. But once the coins leave his tender embrace then staking can begin.
The staking algo should create new coins at the rate of 10% of the remaining coins, per year. As an example: StudMan gets the initial 10%, but those coins are unstakeable. At some point in time, he has passed out 20% of the (10% initial quantity), so therefore the stakeable base = 2% of the final supply and the staking algorithm has 90% of the final supply available to distribute. So at that time, the staking algo is creating new coins at a rate of 9% of final supply, per year, and is distributing them to a handful of people who presently only have 2% of the final total.
This would be a very lucrative deal for the early adopters and will draw criticism from those suggesting the purpose is to enrich the insiders. Although enrichment of the early adopters is a possible and worthy side-effect, it is _not_ the primary goal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WtGcuwq_GY&t=33m10s I just pulled these numbers out of ... wherever ... in order to serve as a baseline for discussion. I welcome tweaks and discussion.