One might argue that the current system is making things much more terrible than any alternative. Software as a service makes sense for some things. But for the majority of things its now being used for, its only purpose is rent seeking. Cryptocurrencies offer an interesting balance between rent seeking and consumer friendliness. You use a piece of software, it mines for coins which are transferred to the company. The more you use their product, the more money they get yet from the user perspective it's all free (beyond some initial purchase) and doesn't even get into the nastiness of the ad world.
Only problem there is that as ASICs are developed, general purpose CPU mining rapidly becomes grossly inefficient, so you'd somehow need a decentralized coin optimized for extremely high usage scenarios that was also resistant to ASICs. Not really sure how you'd achieve that latter part without simply constantly changing the algorithm, but it poses a complex challenge of changing the algorithm in a purely decentralized fashion in a way that one can not build adaptive ASICs for. Though I would imagine this is a solvable problem.
> Not really sure how you'd achieve that latter part without simply constantly changing the algorithm
For many crypto currencies being resistant to ASIC and even GPU miners is an explicit goal since it promotes decentralisation (everyone has a CPU, few have Asics). The usual way to achieve this is to make memory the bottleneck. ASICs are great for speeding up computation and massively parallelising it, but if the bottleneck is not compute but memory or even better memory bandwidth then an ASIC can't have a big advantage.
> Cryptocurrencies offer an interesting balance between rent seeking and consumer friendliness.
Not when you include performance in the "consumer friendliness" side. Existing software is already way too bloated and keeps assuming it's the only thing users run; cryptomining would only exacerbate that effect. Especially that to earn a measurable amount of money over the lifetime of the product, your typical chat app using this model would have to run CPU and GPU at 100% load.
Everything you're stating is driven by wild assumptions that seem to be based on nothing except for trying to paint a pessimistic picture as possible. Everything would be contingent on a huge variety of variables - the algorithm, the usage, whether we think of a unified crypto or software specific coins, and much more. The idea is not to go for another VC hype bubble aiming for 80 billion percent growth or bust, but simply to create a stable source of revenue that companies can use to sustain themselves without resorting to the increasingly broken 'ecosystem' we have in digital rent seeking/advertising today.
This is really quite a perfect application for cryptoes where everybody could win, but there are a number of not yet solved problems that need to be overcome. One issue with this idea, and as with all good decentralized ideas, is that the person who does ultimately create it would likely receive little reward for it. It's not about making money, but about improving the state of software as a whole. There are only so many Tim Berners-Lees.
Only problem there is that as ASICs are developed, general purpose CPU mining rapidly becomes grossly inefficient, so you'd somehow need a decentralized coin optimized for extremely high usage scenarios that was also resistant to ASICs. Not really sure how you'd achieve that latter part without simply constantly changing the algorithm, but it poses a complex challenge of changing the algorithm in a purely decentralized fashion in a way that one can not build adaptive ASICs for. Though I would imagine this is a solvable problem.