I agree that Ethereum has a strong future, but the implications of ideas behind this thread are long on more than just Ethereum. Issues of regulations, national borders, scalability, resilience, etc. will altogether lead to a diversity of blockchains, not a market completely dominated by one blockchain. Maybe Ethereum will be the leader and have 30% of the market (for example), so I'm not saying that the nature of industry in an economy will fundamentally change. But, Ethereum is not a fundamental set of truths, there are other ways to do similar things, and there are incentives to both create and use new blockchains. I'm long on Ethereum, NEO, Bancor, Cosmos, Polkadot...

The world is not going to easily let a group of a few hundred thousand people control trillions of dollars worth of assets without a fight.

I don't know whether another crypto currency will beat Bitcoin. Bitcoin could adopt new features as they are discovered and maintain overall dominance. However, it looks like altcoins have already beaten Bitcoin in applications, such as asset digitization and exchange, liquidity, identity, marketplaces, etc. I think Bitcoin can fight back and adopt zero knowledge proofs and some other features, but not for everything. Network effects are for specific use cases. Having a critical mass of currency features does not always buy you a critical mass of identity verification or decentralized exchange, for example.

There will always be an incentive to create new currencies and incentives to use them. In a world dominated by a single currency, the incentive to create and use new currencies is extremely strong. Therefore, I think there will be many different currencies in the future, and there won't necessarily be one dominant one.

I think many Bitcoin maximalists are used to living in an oligopoly where regulations kill off competition. I think the world of crypto currencies will be different. Practically anyone will be able to issue a new currency. It's sort of ironic when an anarchist is a Bitcoin maximalist and has faith that Bitcoin will dominate because "maths" or whatever. In a free world, the incentive is for practically everyone to issue a new currency for practically anything, to the point that the high quantity of currencies is somewhat suboptimal for everyone collectively. The assumption in economics heretofore is that of a single currency.

I think Bancor is a great buy right now. It's nearly as low in price as it's ever been, and there are several new projects that will use it as their liquidity mechanism, which I don't think is fully factored into the price yet. They are working and partnering with existing local currencies, and predict the emergence of a long tail of millions of complementary currencies. It's something to hold for 5 years.

You'll hear a lot of FUD regarding Bancor, but it's mostly BS. The protocol is already working, the so called "back doors" are temporary, and they plan to be a cross-blockchain protocol, not just Ethereum based. There are incentives to use BNT as reserve. Brilliant team and incredible project.

UPDATE:

2017-06-30: Received my BNT, 8 days after the original withdrawal.

Bad, but not terrible. Seems like most of the exchanges are about the same.

UPDATE:

2017-06-29: Still haven't received my BNT or had my BNT credit on liqui restored. I guess it will take another week or so.

I got a reply around 12 hours ago. They said they will restore my original balance or resend it, but did not give a timeframe.

Liqui BNT withdrawal problem.
Ticket #2693
- I tried to withdraw around 3200 BNT from Liqui on June 22, and the transaction is still invalid, doesn't show up.
- I created a support ticket soon afterwards.
- I haven't received any response.

I successfully withdrew 650 BNT on June 23.

UPDATE:

#252855 - 2017-06-22 13:06 GMT - Failed ETH withdrawal of 6.7 ETH - "Being Processed since 23 hours 57 minutes" - I got a reply.

#252855 - 2017-06-22 13:06 GMT - Failed ETH withdrawal of 6.7 ETH - "Being Processed since 23 hours 57 minutes" - NO reply
#258922 - 2017-06-21 13:16 GMT - Complaint about my other ticket getting ignored - "Being Processed since 11 minutes 7 seconds" - NO reply

I can see that I may need to wait for months for my money.

Am I right that Poloniex is providing NO information about what is going on? I need to liquidate my other assets because of these guys.

I wish I would have sold my ETH for BTC, withdrawn BTC to another exchange, and bought ETH. This is what hell is like. I will avoid Polo in the future when feasible.

This is real news. I know someone who's family gambled on mycoin. I can't say anything about the amounts, however.

I hope something good comes out of this, but to me it doesn't look good. In ShadowChat, how is sender anonymity achieved? Just because of I2P, right? I will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that receiver anonymity works. But sender anonymity is a much harder problem. They're trying to do a lot of different things, and personally I'd rather use one anonymous cryptocurrency, another anonymous communication channel, and yet another anonymous marketplace.

Zerocash (to be released in May). It will probably be the largest ZKP-based anonymous cryptocurrency.

Zerocash is the biggest news in cryptocurrencies since Bitcoin itself. Zerocash, or all anonymous cryptocurrencies as a whole, should become the largest piece of the cryptocurrency pie. There have been many new end-user features in cryptocurrencies since the introduction of Bitcoin, but none of those are as vital as anonymity. It doesn't make sense to tell everyone to use a mixer or a dark wallet, when anonymity could be built into the currency system itself. It doesn't make sense to say that mere pseudonymity is good enough because the goal is transparency (institutions adopting pseudonymous cryptocurrency), when there are people who would use the blockchain to exploit users. Maybe most people don't care about Bitcoin anonymity now, but most people don't use Bitcoin extensively and think of it as a toy.

Yes, that was just an example of something that could be automatically verified. Go would be a more appropriate choice of games. And that would only work if: only beating players rated higher than some threshold counted as PoW (otherwise computers could compete), and enough appropriately skilled players participated.

I think you have a good point, maybe any HIT PoW protocol could be gamed. But I am not convinced it is a lost cause. Yes, it would be vulnerable to cheap labor. If a game like Go was used, IQ and skill would be very important. POS could be combined with a HIT based PoW.

Maybe the key would be to make HITs as difficult as possible. That means that they would need to be fun. And to prevent the system from being gamed, HITs might need to be a part of a larger mathematical problem solution (so maybe collusion/"sybil" attacks could be detected at a low enough level).

If a chess game was integrated into the protocol, such that two players play against each other, and moves are signed with private keys, then I think the winner could be verified automatically. Beating a highly rated player would count more than beating a lowly rated player. The rating system would need to be secure, and some election process would need to determine a system-wide winner/leader set, or something similar.

Another idea is that an election protocol verifies HITs by randomly polling users, such that users sign their votes with their private keys and the votes need to be nearly unanimous.

I hope I'm on the right track here.

Has there been any work on designing a proof-of-work algorithm dependent on HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) ?

An example could be a proof-of-work scheme based on captcha solving. (Assume computers can't solve captchas. Obviously there are captcha-solving systems that work without human intervention.)

The HITs would need to be such that humans are much better than computers at completing them. There might be a mathematical puzzle that reduces to suitable HITs. Those HITs could be presented to humans in a game interface in a client app. Alternatively (maybe no such puzzle is found), there might be some informal HITs that could be verified through a voting system. Another idea that popped into my head is that a challenging game such as Go could be implemented into the protocol of a cryptocurrency, and beating a highly rated player would count as proof-of-work.

EDIT:
Here are some potential reasons such a PoW protocol could be valuable:
1) If enough people were to participate, even money and computational resources would not be enough to do a 51% attack.
2) The HITs could be implemented into games. The games could get a share of mining proceeds.
3) The HITs could be useful, creating a distributed crowdsourcing platform.

Bitcoin is about security by algorithmic design, not security by policy. We should assume nothing about peoples' intentions when using the Bitcoin network. Don't expect anyone to swoop in and save you, unless you're ready for them to be your overlord.

Double spending is a legitimate use of the Bitcoin network.

Zerocoin. Unlike most other alt-coins, it will offer a significant advantage to the end user.

You are wrong, and you are being obtuse. Actually, the OP does not recognize the design principles behind Bitcoin. The responses are merely explaining the proper application of those design principles to the problem of transaction arbitration - e.g. arbitration goes on top of Bitcoin, not inside of it.

The way to make Bitcoin competitive as a payment network is for arbitration to be implemented on top of it. This will be more effective than baking arbitration inside of Bitcoin, because it will allow different countries / groups / applications to use systems or mechanisms uniquely suited to their tasks. Arbitration is quite different in mainland China compared to, say, the US.

Consider, for a moment, that Paypal will never win in mainland China. Two corporate / government -sponsored payment systems dominate mainland China - Alipay and Tenpay. But Bitcoin is doing pretty well in China. Bitcoin is completely international because it doesn't default to any authority and can therefore be relied upon by any entity in the world.