I agree with all your questions.Recent Elon tweets:
Doge requirements
Doge or new coin?
Clarifying performance vs fees
My preliminary takeaway: As always, Elon is concerned about volume, efficiencies and low costs. I agree, but how to get there?
I don't understand crypto well enough, so here are some questions:
- If Doge is currently PoW would it take a hard fork to get to PoS?
- If a hard fork is necessary, will there be Doge Classic and Doge New, like the Ether situation since the hard fork in 2016 to correct the DAO situation?
- How much of Bitcoins current problems re. mining and lack of speed is built into the design and how much is simply due to the popularity of Bitcoin. In other words, how to design first-principles for trillions of fast transactions: Is there a clear winning design or is this still an open research/practical problem?
- Is it likely, that what was basically a joke less than a year ago can become the leading crypto mechanism? I owe this to Dave Lee who in his latest video rhetorically ask that since Elon likes to push things to the limit and beyond, how likely is it that a handful of part-time doge devs can live up to Elons expectations?
- What are Doges plans re. smart contracts and NFTs? Both has increased vastly in popularity - Ethereum seems to be current leader, but other alt-coins like Cardano/ADA, Polkadot parachains, and others are planning to offer smart contract in 2021. Elons hasn't mentioned smart contracts yes AFIK, but it would seem to be necessary in the future.
From this article:
Exclusive: Dogecoin Developers Say They've Been Working with Elon Musk Since 2019 - Decrypt
Dogecoin devs are working with Elon Musk to make the cryptocurrency a cheaper, greener alternative to Bitcoin.
decrypt.co
Very likely they are already quite rich, and my feelings is that changing DOGE it's not an easy task at all. My guess is it's an hard fork, but I'll let other experts correct me if I'm wrong.
Ethereum has been developing for years the shift from PoW to PoS, and they'll probably do it at the end of the year.
And they have a lot of the best devs (like Vitalik Buterin).
The space of 3rd generation crypto is now very crowded (Cardano, Polkadot, and Algo, to name 3 with great leaders and ton of experience). And there will be likely ETH2 among them.
I'm not convinced that Elon can pull off this one, especially as a pet project.