I think ideally you would want to have high quality smart contracts, speed of less than 1 second transaction times, high anonymity and if possible derived from a type of Proof of Stake.
Of those only 1 second transactions are my first priority, and some other priorities you didn't mention. Once you see what I am up to marketing wise, then I think you will understand why.
I think Bitshares delegate Proof of Stake is a bit of a hindrance when it comes to adoption because everyone wants to be on the receiving end of Staking so you get more people who would want to buy traditional Proof of Stake over Delegate Proof of Stake.
The fact that PoS can't do distribution is one of its major hindrances. As people lose their private keys, the currency is highly deflationary which is very bad for encouraging people to spend and use the currency, and use for exchange is what makes the network effects spread the most.
The other hindrance for PoS is that it is impossible for it to be secure without centralized control. Proof-of-stake coins work because they are just private clubs, so there is an apparency of security. I will in the future try to outline (in a future paper) specifically how and why the security of these PoS coins will fail.
The problem with traditional Proof of Stake is that ongoing funding becomes a problem so you have a bit of a catch 22.
It is going to be difficult to fund these crypto projects that don't have widespread adoption. I don't think the paradigm of mining debasement has much to do with it. If a project is widely adopted, the devs will get funded one way or the other.
When it comes to buy/sell pressure from pricing I do not like Proof of Work because it's cost intensive and weighs on price far more than in a Proof of Stake system since you have outside influences that do not have the psychological price barrier of entry so they sell at any price that is profitable, then holders sell into the downward spiral.
Agreed this is a problem when there is a huge double-digit percentage annual debasement due to PoW that is mostly ending up in professional miners hands. The professional miners locate their latest model ASICs next to hydropower plants have 1/4 the electricity costs (compared to residential) and 1/100th - 1/1000th (for a specially designed PoW hash function such as the one I will soon release, not SHA) the computational costs compared to general CPU at home, thus their cost of mining for example a Bitcoin is less than $50 each. They will always have an incentive to add more resources to capture a greater percentage of the mined coins.
But that isn't the only way to structure PoW mining.
There are two ways to deal with this problem:
1) Force every user to submit PoW with their transactions, i.e. no transaction gets on the block chain without PoW attached. Note getting this sort of design to be robust, requires an entirely different way of structuring a block chain. If the attached PoW is low enough difficulty, then it costs more to farm it out (network latency cost) than to mine it locally given it is an insignificant and unnoticeable cost.
2) Limit debasement to a small annual percentage.
In that case, the professional miner will not be able to mine a significant quantity of the coins, and they will not be selling a significant percentage of the market cap. Thus the downward pressure on the price that impacts Bitcoin will be abated.
I did read your paper on the DDOS protection, a little over my head but a good read nonetheless.
For a decentralized cryptocurrency design to do micro-transaction (1 second) block chain that isn't just a set of private servers (which is basically what a PoS system is, such as DPOS), then DDoS is one of the major design hurdles. I am nearly certain that if someone wants to DDoS attack Bitshares, they could do so effectively, because there is one designated server responsible for processing each block.
If there is a sufficiently liquid market for Bitshares, then it could be potentially profitable to short it and DDoS attack it. But as I understand, most of the market caps at coinmarketcap.com are just an illusion. The volume is fake and created by the insiders who own most of the coins, trading to themselves. Thus there really isn't a liquid market and thus you can't really profit by attacking these altcoins, because their markets are actually tiny. It is all a mirage.
Now if you plan to create a currency with millions of users and deep liquidity, then you indeed have to be concerned about DDoS attacks, because they will surely be incentivized.
Apology I didn't really consider the layman when composing that document. I was more interested in making all the key points as concisely and as abstractly generalized as possible. As marketing goes on, those aspects that need to be explained more carefully to laymen, can be.