yes, I especially like your competition in everything quote ... and that's what I despise about fiat currency the most also ... the forced monopoly.
There will be many crypto-currencies 5 years from now and certainly the ones that work best will have the widest adoption. A currency which maintains some stability day to day will win over one that fluctuates so wildly. Even in my own personal experience selling bitcoin to an individual who was trying to actually use them (he wouldn't say what for) ... but his request to me was to offer the coins to him at a fixed rate. The daily fluctuations in price messed up his business model when prices would change before he could complete the whole cycle of a deal.
Managed stability is a good idea ... only problem with the FED system is that it's managed robbery ... lol, as we mentioned before. So, I would love to work with some folks to design a more useable type of crypto-currency. We could just start with a wish list. Some items on my wish list are:
-clients that don't need to download the whole freaking block chain ;-)
-price stability (so I can put an item for sale on a web page and not have to adjust the price every other day).
-built in reputation features ... it could still be anonymous, but it would be nice to see that an address has done some deals and has some positive feedback
-built in escrow features
-backed by something else of value -- Bitcoin blazed the trail and it's not back by anything other than good marketing and perception. Bitcoin does have value now, and so it could be used to back a new virtual currency.
What about you guys? Surely Bitcoin has some features you would like to tweak, no?
As already stated: wallets exist that don't need the entire blockchain.
As to your other issues, I think you've made the mistake of evaluating bitcoin as a standalone currency. Right now it isn't. It will become that eventually if quantum computing doesn't become reality first.
You do not need to concern yourself with price stability as a vendor, simply use a service that converts your inc btc to fiat. Leave the speculation to the speculators, they can hold or trade bitcoins and it won't affect you receiving payments through your service. As an end user, you also don't really need to concern yourself with the price stability most transactions will move in the direction of "purchase item, buy and send bitcoins" rather than a transaction directly from a wallet using bitcoins you already owned. As an early adopter (which is what we all right now) we're a mix of speculators and users... as for wanting to put in the a price and having it be stable over a period of time... why not simply tie it to the exchange rate that your pref exchange uses, then the price would update automagically to whatever fiat they were buying in.
Reputation features are a non-starter on the network level. We're concerned with providing a platform for exchange. This would be best handled by a service or site that does it as part of it's other business. If you see a need for this feature - make that site and transmit the messages on the blockchain, call it something cool, then get wallet providers to include your API to pull that information relative to a public address.
Escrow features are a bad idea on the network level. I know I'd like them also... but really... how could you prevent someone from simply not releasing escrow? Much better to provide this a service linked to the reputation site imo.
I'm not even going to talk about alt-coins.
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The only tweak I'd love to see would be a massive increase in block generation rate. I want lower difficulty, more blocks (like one ever 30 seconds or per min), the linking of transaction fees to both 'size of tx' and 'difficulty' along with an proportional decrease in the block reward. IMO this has to happen soon and really should be the focus of the devs (or at the very least the foundation) for the simple fact that if we can't service potential transactions we're placing a very real barrier to adoption. I'd love to see 10 confirmations take only 5 mins - lets really focus on exploiting the tech available instead of just saying "it's already way faster than a wire transfer' - because what we really need is for a vendor to be able to take a payment a point of sale - wait 30 seconds and know that it's paid.