I think this is implicit in the 2021 roadmap, but IMO the goal for the PPC community should be to make PPC the Green Bitcoin and nothing more. What do I mean by that?
First, I think BTC and PoW has a fundamental flaw in that the miners incentives are not the same as the holders (they may be close, but not identical). Add in energy waste and concentration of mining power, and at some point BTC could fail. And if it could fail at some point, then it’s a certainly it will fail in ____ years/decades/etc.
So, I believe in PoS. However, BTC has something going for it - it’s hard to replicate the energy consumption of 0.1% of the world’s energy production. No other PoW coin is likely to surpass that anytime soon, and there is security of some degree in that. With PoS, energy consumption is not required to maintain the security of the chain (a meta nothing-at-stake problem). So, anyone could generate a thousand knock off of a PoS protocol and each would be secure.
Therefore, how does a PoS coin gain acceptance and therefore value? And what should Peercoin do? If you asked me 5 years ago, I would say advance the protocol to encourage dapp developers to use PPC as their base layer. That ship has sailed - there’s Ethereum/Caser, Cardano, Polkadot, Algorand and a dozen more to follow. It’s an arms-race to an eventual winner where all the development work will be based on a common, universal and/or interoperable protocol - that protocol will be the winner. If I thought I knew who that winner would be, I’d invest there.
What can Peercoin do now? Well, I don’t believe BTC’s usefulness is limited. With Lightning network and worldwide talent still trying to take BTC and crypto to the masses, the scalability problem will be solved. So, our best hope for PPC to gain widespread attention is to: 1) make PPC a like for like swap for BTC in all of the infrastructure (layer 2 systems, wallets, interfaces, etc) being built for BTC; and 2) to keep beating the drum on energy conservation.
Conclusion, make Peercoin’s codebase as much like BTC as possible, save for PoS. Make it the “Green Bitcoin” and an easy pivot. With [8] years of history, no pre-mine, and consistent vision, that could put us ahead of the PoS race to replace BTC.