Quote from: kokojie on September 08, 2014, 04:12:12 PM

P2pool is a good alternative, but hacking is actually far from my biggest concern. My biggest concern with PoW is that continuous non-stop transfer of wealth from the Bitcoin community into the pockets of mining hardware vendors and electric company. This I believe is the biggest reason we are seeing the strange price action this year, with massive amount of good news and adoption, the price keeps dropping. I think this is due to the inflow of capital can not keep up with the insane mining cost (and wealth transfer rate out of the Bitcoin eco-system into the pockets of hardware/electric companies).

All valid concerns and criticisms (additionally, environmental concerns) which can be addressed and will naturally be addressed through market forces by these means:

1) PoW mining is so competitive that it will only remain profitable with free electricity. This can be addressed by solar, wind and microhydro with initial investment sunk costs and than using part of that energy to perform tasks that need to be done by everyone anyways : heating water, heating food , heating air in cold environments with near 100% efficiency.

2) p2p decentralized mining pools can eventually become stable and large enough where fees are cheaper and we can even adjust the bitcoin protocol to incentivize or encourage p2p.

3) Mining hardware vendors have large costs and have to constantly reinvest , but I would love having one or multiple non-profit ASIC manufactures controlled by a large group of bitcoin users. Kickstarter/indigogo anyone? With a multisig wallet we can even vote on the companies behaviors in a decentralized manner without the risk of a ceo or accountant committing fraud.

Your concerns are all valid and perhaps a certain version of POS could exist that is secure. DPOS and POSV are all patches of POS that don't quite address the flaws within POS completely. POW has a huge advantage and disadvantage with attaching its security to hardware and electricity. Perhaps a hybrid of POSV/POW would be a good thing for bitcoin in the future.

Only the negatives of Bitcoin mining are focused upon without weighing the positive effects. The competition between ASIC manufactures will eventually influence and push new technology of faster micro-circuitry instead of the recent stagnant progress made by AMD and Intel. The competition has already spurred improvements in datacenter designs where more efficient heat extraction and density layouts are being implemented. The Mining race is driving the need for free and cheaper electrcity which will have to come from cheap and renewable energy sources. (You are already seeing mining companies moving to locations that use geothermal energy as one example) . Mining races will eventually spur heating appliances to secure the network and heat food/water/air so will make dumb appliance smart and serve more than one purpose.