d5000
Thanks for the summary. Can you explain: are the above proposals merely ideas or theories at this stage, or are they achievable?
In other words, is there a known solution to the conundrum of minting coins while in cold storage, or is this an, as yet, untested, hope?
They are theories but I think they are achievable too 
I see no logical problems with them, only it’s a bit of work to implement it securely without new attack vectors.
The cold-locked-transaction proposal (Sunny’s) is some months around there. Sunny had even said in December or January that he wanted to include it in the next release (which is now rescheduled to 0.5). Would be nice if he could confirm it.
I think he reads these threads and if one of the other proposals is easier to implement, he perhaps will take it into account.
Seems that PPC’s younger bielorussian sister NXT is now testing a way to do cold-locked minting in it’s newest release. It’s called “Leased Forging”:
http://www.nxtcrypto.org/nxt-change-log/nxt-095e-change-log
Their approach is a bit similar to Sunny’s “cold-locked transactions”. Everybody who wants to have his/her coins in cold storage but let another account earn stake can “lease” the balance to another account for a determined number of blocks, and for this time the coins are frozen and cannot be “un-leased”. (I haven’t figured out still if they can be moved/spent during this time).
The problem I see here is if there are no limitations for the number of accounts that “lease” their coin-age to another account, there can develop powerful “forging pools” that can get dangerous amounts of coin-age. I don’t know if/how they prevent this, as there is little information on their site about the feature. I think if PPC decides to introduce something similar there should be a limitation (e.g. maximal 2 accounts can lease to one another account) to prevent this kind of centralization.
“forging pools” sounds like a bad thing for serious 