I don't see penalizing those who don't transact as a viable model for a store-of-value which is one of the attributes of money.
Cryptocurrency is essentially just a video game where the player is effectively AFK but still playing by a static input (mining at a fixed rate by having a rock on the keyboard). I don't think you will ever get any type of decentralization out of that model. To create a real decentralized currency would probably require active participation from miners or senders of transactions (solving a captcha or whatever) instead of pretending you can have decentralization by having all input variables on cruise control.
Instead of stake holders or other participants having to constantly manually interact with the system (such as Vitalik seems to be trying), the only way that really makes sense is having senders of transactions require manual, human based PoW.
Malthusians want to return to simpler time when there was no surplus and thus we were all struggling every day to find food:
That statement is nonsensical referring to people who know that increasing technology requires an exponential resource commitment curve, increasing vertical integration and loss of freedom as "Malthusians". Kaczynski is correct and increasing complexity always results in loss of freedom.
"Progress" doesn't exist. The further you go the more it's going to be a tyranny run by technocrats where humans mirror the social structure of ants in complete collectivism and every centimeter of our closed ecosystem is micromanaged with no escape.
The technocrats at the top never have to actually meet any type of merits for their position (unlike real ants that have to do stuff like lay eggs), so it always turns into just a plain old 3rd world, rent seeking, banana republic tyranny. It then either collapses under it's own weight or people tear it down since it doesn't serve them and enter a new dark ages in a cyclical nature.