Afaics, some hair-brained idea to attempt to discourage double-spends within a 0-confirmation interval (or n-confirmations of an orphaned chain).

The only way to deal with double-spends within this interval is to trust the reports from a majority of the P2P network and assume that is what will be in the winning chain.

All these other ideas will just be worse. Todd so far (in the few instances I've come across his logic) has not impressed me as being an astute designer and developer.

However, my assumptions could be wrong if there are other complex (and fragile!) rules being employed in the P2P network w.r.t. to transaction ordering. I do expect Bitcoin to become a fragile, broken spaghetti. This is what happens from design-by-kitchen-soup consensus.