It’s actually a good idea to think about this problem. There must be some way to make the hashing contest useful for some other purpose; or if not, a better hash than SHA can be picked (like memory-bound hash functions).
Why would anyone switch? Well, SHA will be broken sooner or later. When that happens, people will be interested in switching to a Bitcoin 2.0 (eg. by destroying regular bitcoins in exchange for new bitcoin2.0s).
EDIT: and clean up other parts of the protocol: http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hardfork_Wishlist
It’s actually a good idea to think about this problem. There must be some way to make the hashing contest useful for some other purpose; or if not, a better hash than SHA can be picked (like memory-bound hash functions).
Why would anyone switch? Well, SHA will be broken sooner or later. When that happens, people will be interested in switching to a Bitcoin 2.0 (eg. by destroying regular bitcoins in exchange for new bitcoin2.0s).
EDIT: and clean up other parts of the protocol: http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hardfork_Wishlist