I mean, as a species we dig up gold for the sole purpose of putting it into well protected vaults as a store of value. It's not a far cry to say we'll simply store the radioactive gold in lead vaults instead.
But yeah, if we can print rare earth metals now, I won't be betting on them to store economic value.
I think that there is still substantial utility in leveraging a mining paradigm as an alternative to centralized staking for ERC-20 tokens. Standardizing new mineable tokens on a proposed Mineable EIP offers a homogenous framework for mining software and equipment in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Hardware mining is a viable way to economically bridge value from the real world (electricity and hardware costs) to an ethereum token. It allows for early adopters to participate substantially without necessarily requiring a centralized, OTC or distributed marketplace.
0xBitcoin offers the best of both worlds - the economic peg of hardware mining/electricity with the exchangeability of the ERC-20 ecosystem ( centralized and decentralized exchanges ). As the tooling and standard gets flushed out, I believe 0xTokens could usher in a new wave of assets on a superior ubiquitous platform.
Wow, those are some very nice buzzwords. But really...
Wouldn't the most economical way of bridging value from the real world be to just take real money, rather than have it inefficiently pass through hardware and electricity costs? Aka, trading ETH for tokens like every other token. I mean I COULD pay my barber with sacks of potatoes...or I could just give him cash.
As for the argument of not needing exchanges, you don't need an exchange to issue tokens. You send ETH to a smart contract, and it stores the address. This already works and is decentralized. If you wanted to TRADE those tokens, you do need an exchange. So this mining scheme doesn't really solve exchangeability at all.
