kokojie, you have a few decent points, but I agree with inBitweTrust you have overplayed your hand here.
First, the main thing working against the price right now is the monetary supply inflation rate. It is currently between 10% and 15% per year right now depending on how many coins, if any, are assumed to be lost. And regardless of the total available supply, we know there are at least 1.3 million coins set to be issues per year right now. At $400 per coin that is over $500 million in new wealth that would have to come in to buy up all those coins.
So what if was some sort of proof of state, and those 1.3 million coins went to existing holders? You have a good point that us existing holders wouldn’t be under the same finical pressure to sell coins as the miners, as ostensibly we wouldn’t have such large expenses to cover. But make no mistake: many of those new coins would still hit the market, and there would still be massive downward price pressure due to 1.3 million new coins hitting the market.
Proof of work is ingenious. It doesn’t solve all problems though, and I think the community would be wise to always consider adapting the bitcoin security system if better solutions are proven. Economic efficiency will be part of the security calculation, and I would not be at all surprised to see a PoS / PoW hybrid system in the future.
You keep saying PoW mining transfers value out of the ecosystem. I don’t think that is the appropriate way to view it. I see it as more helpful to look at all of the mining hardware as an investment the community is making in its own security system. How much do we invest in such a system? The current incentives suggest the investment be equal to the expected value of all the un-mined coins + expected transaction fees. I will agree that this incentive could be leading us astray, that we could be over-investing in ASIC hardware and electricity costs. So the question is, what should we be investing in instead? Perhaps more code development? More legal work? More bitcoin education? What if we, as a community, could figure out a way to steer 20% of mining revenues towards other goals? That would be $100,000,000 per year at current prices. It wouldn’t appreciably change the investment in hash power (okay, it would reduce it by 20%), but we would be expanding by 30-fold the amount invested in software development and etc.
I think the way this would be most likely to happen would be someone presenting a plan to all the mining pools, and getting them all to agree to turn over some percentage of mined coins to some representative body that would transparently reinvest the coins into aspects of the ecosystem other than hashing data centers. The miners could like this proposal because they could realize that through collective effort, and “giving up” a fraction of their proceeds, they could actually boost the value of bitcoin by far more in the long run.
And you wouldn’t actually need all miners to go along with the plan, just 70% - 80% of the hash power. The remaining ones could be forced to comply
. Miners getting together and planning: you can call it a cartel, collusion, or cooperating. It really just depends on your perspective.
Bitcoin talk threads that turn into rants are not going to solve the problem though, and there is just no way that proof-of-work mining is going to be abandoned outright or suddenly in any way. Nor should it be. It has gotten us this far already, so there is certainly something to it. What can help is if someone wants to put in the work of building consensus amongst the mining pools to diverting a small fraction of new coins to other bitcoin projects.
Think multi-sig. The whole endeavor could be done in a transparent, cryptographically audible fashion.