Vlad, I was attracted to this thread by your imaginative and fascinating riddle. I enjoyed your explanation even more. I am thinking about putting a (tiny) percentage of my bitcoins into ixc as a result - enough to act as a good hedge in case you are right.
I share many of fears about bitcoin and I would like to ask your opinion of the cryptonote and other anon coins.
Pirate Ragnar
A huge issue with BTC and IXC is the amount of wasted energy. Look how many millions of dollars it cost just to mine BTC. And for something arbitrary, like 10 leading zeros on the block hash, which serves no purpose, other than making it harder to verify a transaction. All PoW coins will fail.