Beware: we have tens of votes on the polls, but how many people are helding EMC2 actually? The majority of EMC2 holders may be unaware of our discussions here, not everybody spends their time on forums. To change the fundamentals of a coin is something to do with enormous care - it's a violation of the whole concept behind a cryptocurrency: no serious investor would easily put money in a coin which menaces to change it's way to be generated every time that it's value does not rise.
This being said, if the community nevertheless decides for a change, a mixed PoW/PoW would probably be the best way to go, because it would strenghten the network against possible attacks and in my view our community is still far too little for a successful PoS coin. I'm repeating my question: once we are pure PoS why would someone OUTSIDE our community sudenly wish to buy our coins? If you can explain it to yourself please explain it also to me, I still don't get it. But beware that if your argument then doesn't work that's the case of the value of the coin finally dropping to zero. I understand that the few tens of people who have voted the poll own all together most of the coins in circulation and they dream of becoming rich very fast - I share your same dream, but I am also a realist. Who would buy our coins once we are the only ones to produce them by the way of PoS? Come on, this is a quite childish expectation.
I'm repeating it once again: we are here to give life to a coin which has the embedded property of funding science, no matter which its market price is. If we will be able to achieve that, we will also end up being happy with the coins price. There are no other ways. To this regard, I must say I am not happy with the funding of science having been halted for a few epochs because the price is low, as well as I am not happy with the payments to the awarded scientific projects being delivered in dollars, as it happened in the past. We should ALWAYS send the EMC2 coins to the winners, no matter which their value is. We can explain to the winners how to transform their coins in dollars, if that is what they prefer, but we should exclusively deliver EMC2s. The coins are worth little? Then winners are unlucky, we'll suggest them to keep the coins until they will be worth more. If we deliver dollars instead of EMC2 we betray our own coin, we send out a strong message that EMC2's value is only in terms of dollars, it looks like we don't believe in our own coin, we show that we didn't really get the new paradigm behind cryptocurrencies, we basically just do it wrong. The proof of the validity of I say? If you think in terms of dollars, when the market price drops you'll end up stopping with the process of awarding coins to science, thus destroying the credibility of the whole project. The coin is less than 4 months old, so these mistakes can be still recovered, but if the community does not understand these basic things we'll more likely to go down, rather than up again.
Regarding the change, perhaps we could think at something which has not been done yet (as far as I know, but of course I may be wrong, there are so many coins out there), a mixed PoW/PoS system with the embedded feature of a slow transition to PoS, perhaps over a couple of years.
I agree that IN THE END PoS sounds a way to go for cryptocurrencies in general, because it's echological, doesn't feed an unsustainable "arm race" of ASICS, etc, but you really have to have a big and strong community to be successful in that. Mintcoin had a community much bigger than ours, was quite well branded, but nevertheless since it's PoS the coin's price is slowly fading away.
A mixed PoW/PoS system which slowly goes in the direction of PoS could be an interesting solution. At the beginning it would be mainly PoW, like now, with just a minimal component of PoS. The ratio between PoW and PoS could change with every Epoch. A bit of PoW could be kept even for a some decades, this way there would always be the possibility for mining entusiasts to get some coins this way. Perhaps someone could start doing a bit of math on this.
First of all, I appreciate the time you've spent creating such a passionate and poignant post about the voting issue. I am also somewhat disappointed with the lack of vote count. To answer your question "Why would someone outside of our community want to buy our coin?" - The answer would be, because we are going to introduce a new system for donating to science that will increase the value of coins you hold. To invest in the future of science as well as your own financial future. That new system is much more necessary than a change of algorithm but it will take longer to flesh-out and implement. That being said, it is a priority of mine to introduce the new system as soon as possible. I've been brainstorming a lot but I would also like to hear yours and everyone else's input as well.
I'll be running a new poll for PoS, PoW, or PoW / PoS soon. If there are any other new innovative ideas to be put on the table please let me know ASAP.
Thanks again for your input.
