I would drop the number of coins to maybe one billion or less.
I agree that there are too many coins, it makes it difficult to trade, ie there are next to no BTC/TIPS exchanges and if so there is no volume rendering it useless.
I am also concerned about the sheer amount already out there relative to the progress as a concurrency. I am not opposed to early adopters being rewarded for getting in early however from the maths an estimate of 130 Billion were mined in the first 52000 blocks and about 195 Billion in the first 104000 blocks, currently in order of 367000 which equates to about 305 Billion. Of which only 680 Million is (based on Fedoracoin Foundation donations) is actively trying to advance the coin.
I believe the culture of most Altcoins is to get in early hoard and wait and see. This kind of thing is what is killing Fedoracoin because with the numbers above, early adopters are doing nothing to spread and enhance the coin and you are almost better off scrapping the coin as it is and starting afresh, except you will likely see the same thing happen again.
The current talk of reducing the number of coins I am guessing is a flat scaling like there will be a total of 500 Billion and we want to get that down to 1 Billion, so all coins will now be divided by 500. Instead of going straight to flat scaling, I would like to see a mechanism which deters hoarding, like a decay over time of long term unused coins.
Another idea which I had for burning coins (thus reducing the total number) would be to host a series of burning lotteries in which a prize is drawn and the entries would be the coins burned. This would have the added effect of attaching a real value to the coins which might be worth buying to burn to get a chance to win, much like how cryptsy points work.
I think the problem of having had so many coins, the owners of which are not active, can be solved too through the swap. we could actually leave this blockchain operating just as it is now, so the old owners won't lose their coins if they decided to come back, but they won't be on the TiPS 2.0 chain. The members who decide to swap, would send their coins which will get burned, and receive the new ones. and we create an entirely new blockchain with POS and the reduced amount. this way, hoarding won't be that bad either because the members who keep their coins to stake will be supporting the network. I think decay over time is not a good idea as was shown with Freicoin, because nobody wants their value to diminish over time but increase which POS and participation in new businesses with dividends will achieve.
burning lotteries might be an additional method to the traditional swapping if somebody builds that and offers such prizes, while taking a percentage as his business model for doing that.
sounds reasonable?