Not really a direct reply to your comment, but tangential: In the case of replacing proof of work with something else, how will the coins be distributed? Who

Not really a direct reply to your comment, but tangential: In the case of replacing proof of work with something else, how will the coins be distributed? Who will trust the distributors enough to adopt it? POW has been effective in distributing new coins, although it has been too friendly to early adopters. I like the hybrid POW/POS (proof of stake) altcoins for increasing the energy efficiency of the network while still fairly distributing coins to miners. There are too many alternative coins, no one stands out enough to look like overtaking Bitcoin's popularity. I like the idea from the article of modifying the block time down from 10 minutes. Gradually moving to a 1-minute block time should be possible, but it is too radical to be considered. How will future improvements to Bitcoin be voted on? Increasing the blocksize has only been done because (I'm guessing) there is little alternative, or other alternatives would change things too much. Of course making more changes to Bitcoin adds 'political risk' that deter potential adopters. One problem with bitcoin and alternatives is that the main venue for discussion is such a "ghetto". Bitcointalk.org is the defacto official bitcoin site, but the quality of the discussion on there varies wildly and there is little protection from scams. This is just the nature of it, being a simple forum.