I think electroneum’s recent blockchain change to only allow trusted parties to mine it is a good one (and I say that as someone who owns a cryptonight ASIC miner ). I think it provides good blockchain security for this stage in the project’s life, that was not completely guaranteed by a POW crypto with a relatively low network hashing power (low compared to say bitcoin and ethereum). Also the reduction in emissions should help the price, and getting etn into the hands of NGO’s seems like a really good idea.
However the long term issue/ concern I think is that the new system does have increased centralisation. As the etn team are able to select the ‘trusted miners’ it could potentially be possible for the team to switch off all miners except themselves and hence control more then 50% of the hashing power. There is no motivation for the etn team to do this, however an example of a potential issue is if say etn was adopted in a country that had sanctions on it, a government could put pressure on the etn team to take control of the network and disrupt transactions or something like that. I think it is unlikely but the point is that element of centralisation could potentially be a point of weakness.
I think it would be good if the of the etn are able to start developing a truly decentralised model, even if it takes two or three years to roll out, to ‘futureproof’ the blockchain.