is there an altcoin that addresses any of BTC's issues?

[opticalcarrier]

Such as size of the ledger, risk of the 2/3 vs 1/3 mining ratio and hiding hashes, etc?  And/Or even more ideally, one that implements some kind of escrow.

There is a thread in the regular forums that Id like to participate in but Im a noob.

[DannyHamilton]

Such as size of the ledger,

This is an issue?  The ledger is not even 20 GB in size?  It would fit on a single layer blu ray disk with room to spare for a few more years.  It doesn't even fill up 0.5% of a 4 TB hard drive.

risk of the 2/3 vs 1/3 mining ratio

The only way for an electronic currency to work is for there to be a consensus on which transactions have occurred and in which order.  If you don't want a centralized system where you have to trust a person or company to enforce this consensus, then you are left with a system where the nodes of the network must enforce the consensus on each other.  If you don't want a system where a minority of the power can over-rule the consensus, you are stuck with accepting the consensus from the majority.

and hiding hashes, etc?

Hiding hashes? Explain?

There is a thread in the regular forums that Id like to participate in but Im a noob.

That won't last long.  Have fun.

[opticalcarrier]

I think the ledger size will be an issue, eventually.  Consider if in a few years BTC does take off as the de facto standard digital currency (which at this point, looking like it will be the one, its just adoption time that is an issue) then what about when transaction rate REALLY starts to kick in.

the 1/3 and 2/3 thing wasnt stictly the de/centralized type of scenario issue as much as it was regarding a published vulnerability regarding possibility of a large mining pool running rogue code that would find a block buy not immediately publish the coins so as to get a jump on crunching on the next hash.  see http://www.scribd.com/doc/181412760/Bitcoin-Mining-Vulnerability-Paper  Although obviously this wouldnt be an issue (I dont believe) after all coins have been dispersed from the protocol.