While I agree on the POW and lack of scalability, I do think that two projects are working on some great solutions that can very easily be integrated into the Bitcoin source code if the miners will let them. They are DPOS from Bitshares, and the scalability solutions using patricia trees that is being used with Ethereum. These two projects are game changers when it comes to cryptocurrency and if Gavin doesn't implement anything they put in when it is shown that these methods work, I think Bitcoin will go the way of Napster and die (I don't understand why everything has to go through bitcoin...if the infrastructure works for bitcoin, chances are it'll work for other cryptocurrencies).