Coming back one more time, because I've read two comments here about the Bitcoin ecosystem since I left, I've made some progress since, and I think I am probably qualified to talk about what if any work in the Bitcoin and altcoin ecosystem is fundamental enough to warrant ESR's attention.
Have you thought about blogging at steemit.com?
I earned up to $2000 per blog, but the opportunity to do so was only during July 2016 when the price had pumped up to $4. Jeff Berwick earned $10,000+ on his first blog and some sexbomb earned $20,000+ for an amateur video about makeup. Some of those who blogged in the couple of months before the price rise ended up grossing $100,000+.
We were only able to cash out 50% of what we earned, because of the original 1 year average weighted delay for earned tokens to become free trading.
There is no more value in blogging on Steem and the price is continuing to decline. IMO, the model is incorrect and the system is controlled by whales.
Bitcoin and all the altcoin designs to date lack long-term decentralization (and Bitcoin is currently undergoing the "scalepocalypse" that I predicted a years ago). It is a fact of nature that resources become power-law or exponentially distributed. This is a fundamental problem which so far inhibits maintaining decentralization of control over consensus protocols. Decentralized paradigms have the property of not being fungibly aggregated (i.e. lacking economies-of-scale), e.g. sex (although this can even be argued to be top-down controlled via religion, mass-media, culture, etc).
I am working on this fundamental problem. I don't expect a panacea. TCP/IP isn't a panacea. We strive for paradigms which serve some real world purpose. I am working on a new statically typed language which will transpile to JavaScript (initially bootstrapped via transpiling to TypeScript) and which is focused on solving concurrency soundness without the total order tsuris of Rust's IMO incorrect borrowing model, as well adding lucid code aspects that aren't in JavaScript such as "everything as an expression", Python indenting instead of brace-delimited, integer types, etc.. All still very early stage and I had disseminated Tuberculosis (and concomitant delirium) for the past several years and didn't get the diagnosis until January 2017 so all my plans are all very speculative at this point. A community of investor support is forming but the open source aspect has not yet begun in earnest (except for some Issues discussion interaction with @keean on Github).