Personally I hope for a crypto-currency scheme that inflates with use and avoids the runaway "lets burn electricity as fast as we can" aspect of BTC mining.
The computational cost of Bitcoin mining not only serves to bootstrap the totality of the BTC into the ledger but also is designed to protect the network. It is also a teeny-tiny fraction of the power required by the legacy banking infrastructure all over the world. It is not a waste.
1. I don't care how much electricity the banks use. That's why I didn't say banks are awesome and bitcoin sucks because of power usage.
2. The power of the network only really protects against the 51% attack. Why not have a crypto system that doesn't have such a ludicrous, energy burning arms race built in?
Can you imagine how much energy all those armored trucks use that ferry around dollars?
I'm not sure, but I can tell you that it's more energy than is required to ferry around bitcoins in armored trucks from now until the end of time (which is exactly 0 joules of energy)