I can see why Bitcoin would want to do that.
Why is it in the interest of people here to help out? The only detail that seems substantially interesting is the last bullet point.
There's also serious academic work already on cryptocurrencies. What do you think people here can offer beyond that?
There is a significant gap between the fields of distributed systems (and consensus) and game-theory.
There is one well known cryptocurrency innovator who, in a private group, denounced the usage of economics or game theory to secure the consensus of a cryptocurrency ledger, and the justification lacked rationality.
It may have been this gap in academia compounded with the irrational arguments put forth by somebody well known in the crypto currency community which prompted Vitalik to seek help from this community.
My bias is with my own work, so I would appr...
Vitalik says cryptocurrency developers should "reach out to LessWrong more", in order to not be ignorant of advanced computer science and game theory topics.
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/12/31/silos/
I think Vitalik raises several major important points, namely:
* Bitcoin's $600 million wasted on electricity yearly in order to secure the network is a huge problem. Various Proof of Stake algorithms are attempting to improve upon this. The ideal solution would be one which combines the low cost of the Proof of Stake algorithm, with the high security or Proof of Work. I not enough of an expert to be able to say which solution is best, but both the Ripple consensus algorithm and the Bitshares Delegated Proof of State algorithm look promising. I am interested to see what algorithm Vitalik will choose for Ethereum.
* ASIC miners are a problem due to the resulting centralization. They have also lead to increased centralization in Bitcoin, as the network is now increasingly controlled by a few large mining pools.
* Blockchain technologies have a great potential to change the world, and solve governmental and organizational problems that society is facing. Beyond simply revolutionizing money, blockchain technologies could also be used in the future to support prediction markets, voting/consensus building, exchanges, etc.