Switchting to another alt coin when NSA and the like are already aware of the power of crypto currencies will be probably more difficult. To buy in to a new alt coin in the starting phase will be a cheap attack for them. Silently running >50% of the nodes and when they need to interfere they have all in place.
All these solutions which are built on security by control of a majority will be vulnerable if creation of a node is cheap. Maybe we need other concepts, something what is not possible to simulate with computers. Computers still cannot write text or translate language in somehow accaptable quality (maybe that will be not valid in some point in the future anymore...). Maybe the culture creation products like wikipedia entries could be used as security backbone? That would also create incentives for people creating value.
I posted recently a very rough idea about an anti spam mechanism here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=387850.0
That could be used as mechanism for content creation and valuation as well.
Think of Reddit where users have to pay for postings and earn money if others like their postings (of course there are many abuse scenarios, needs much more refinement, just a rough idea yet...)
And maybe the basic distribution of money could be like a basic income for every human user (a problem how to proove a human id...). People who are creating more for the society can earn something on top of the basic income.
Not sure if its a good idea to build in so much ideology into a money system, but on the otherhand money is never free of ideology (btc use the austrian school ideology).
And of course I have no idea how such stuff could be implemented... As I said before just very rough ideas yet....


> Am 28.12.2013 um 13:05 schrieb Jorge Timón <jtimon@???>:
>
>> On 12/27/13, Thomas Hartman <thomashartman1@???> wrote:
>> However, I am not so optimistic that the market will take care of censorship
>> because transaction mining will shift to jurisdictions with leniency.
>>
>> In theory this sounds right. Iin practice though transaction fees form a
>> tiny part of overall miner reward, and this situation could plausibly
>> continue for decades, and probably at least years.
>>
>> Miners are currently massively incentivized by block reward, transaction
>> fees are just icing on the cake. And while many are sympathetic to privacy
>> and libertarian concerns, mining is a business and business comes first.
>
> The subsidy to miners will finish and bitcoin miners will live only on fees.
> There's also other alts where the subsidy ends much faster.
> But even if transaction fees are a minimal part of miner's total
> reward, even a 1% annual return difference mean the difference between
> a profitable and an unprofitable operation.
>
> If Bitcoin becomes the orwellian virtual currency that the people on
> top of the pyramid dream about, we will just switch to another alt
> that keeps being a p2p currency uncontrolled by anyone.
>
>> I'll try to go a little more technical now. Picking up from my earlier
>> comment, there are (at least) two privacy attacks worth pondering
>>
>> 1) address registration
>> 2) prohibition of mixing
>>
>> These are distinct scenarios. In particular, you could have address
>> registration but tumbling permitted, so a state could form a picture of what
>> everyone has and tax wealth; but not necessarily form a picture of the
>> flows.
>
> They could also censor transactions coming out certain addresses. Any
> address owned by a dissident of the system, for example. This is
> intolerable. And the currency wouldn't be p2p anymore so it wouldn't
> make sense to keep using a costly p2p global consensus algorithm when
> there's no gain compared to running the system in a single centralized
> server.
>
>> One could also imagine a scenario where addresses are not required to be
>> registered, but dark wallet style transaction tumbling is hounded into the
>> shadows to the point where it only exists on the fringes. This one seems
>> less likely to me, but not completely impossible. Such a scenario a state
>> attacker (or maybe even a motivated