Reducing the collateral requirement would only superficially (at first) increase security, because let's face it we'd all just be running 3/4/5 BNs on the same machine(s) instead of 1. We'd have ~100 BN's immediately with a 50k collateral each but no real world improvement. It
would however make it easier for new players to get on board going forward.
eg. 50k BCR @ 1000 sats is 0.5BTC - hardly a huge investment, so might attract more people. Those of us who are prepared to invest a bit more will in time be better off as we'll also have BN capital for p2p loans, backed asset issuance etc. It isn't a deal breaker for me either way, maybe it's worth lowering to 50k just to try and ignite more interest. There is still going to be inflationary pressure from new mintage, making BNs more affordable is a good counter to that, but blockchain security should be the paramount consideration.
Just 200 BN's within a month or two, reasonably distributed, would probably give us much better actual security than any pool-mined PoW currency even without per-block subsetting. Subsetting 10% of them would be even better, 160 compromised nodes out of 200 would only give an attacker a 1.1% chance with 20 random nodes needed for consensus. And it just gets better from there.
The block time thing isn't a big issue for me. Faster is better, 30 secs would be fine if lower than that would cause issues. Maybe the new scheme would avoid or mitigate the problem dragos mentioned with p2pool, I'm happy to let those better qualified decide what's technically appropriate.
So first, we must spread the coin to many more adopters, easing the mining, having more options to mine the coin, solo/pool, provide a good return of the investment time in mining. Having a stable network, less bugs in wallet, having something that work 100%.
I use the 6 mil in publicity, hiring good developers to do "a work", not thinking if that is good for community/coin or not, but doing what they are told, listing the coin on cryptsy/poloniex and trying even to have his own market (eg XMR) ... and so on. SPREAD THE COIN, MASS ADOPTION !!!
After, releasing the various services, thinking of business ...
Very much agreed here on sensibly spending the 6 million, it's no use sat there doing nothing. There's a lot of competition in this space and time is of the essence. And at some point we should set up a BCR testnet.
Speaking of adoption, that will happen as BCR grows into a viable and capable platform, but I frankly don't care very much about 'adoption' by bitcointalk users.
Business to business automated escrow, reserve-backed assets, p2p lending once the credit scoring system is worked out, etc. ... things like this matter more to me.
I know a lot of people don't take the risks associated with pooled PoW mining seriously, or even concede their existence, but there's a reason big money is shy of BTC - ask yourself if you had $millions++, would you trust it to a system that could be taken down and wrecked by compromising just 3 publicly known or easily identifiable machines? That's not security, and just because nobody has bothered to break BTC yet doesn't mean it will never happen, because for any serious adversary it's a cheap trivial op. Having an actually secure blockchain is important.
What's been talked about here recently can
a) Give us actual blockchain security, not just security theatre
b) Fund faster and better development
It's been a very good few pages.