It seems like this could leave a lot of miners unhappy when their deposits aren't returned because of "natural" cause. (Like a sudden run of "by chance" rapidly forged blocks which do not include their reveal tx, but runs out their "x blocks" counter.)
Awww, come on, if you spend xxxxx on mining equipment, buying what is probably a two figure $ amount of XEL is not that big of a deal, is it?
I mean, I get what you mean and XEL will miss out on lots of mining power that is pointed elsewhere due to inconvenience, but it would lose even more mining power, if miners would avoid it because of the risk of being outrun. Kind of a "lesser evil" deal.
Additionally, there may be ways to get XEL "outside" of the system,to incentivise new miners to get in.
Or you create a loan service, where miners can loan a start amount of XEL for BTC or whatever they have laying around.
Actually, in my scheme you would be able to submit PoW submissions with 0 XEL, just no bounty submissions. SO you would have to keep PoW'ing until you have enough for the bounty deposit fee.
Also having to reveal the bounties in "x blocks" might be very well "x seconds" based on the next blocks' timestamps (which can no be tampered that much by a malicious forger) as well.
Just brainstorming.
(EDIT: Note that while it is assumed that watching for PoW certs should be "pointless" I'm afraid that it isn't, as I'll illustrate later. Wink)
Im really interested ....
I'll have to re-check one of my remaining (DoS) attacks (which I've been calling the "max backtrack attack") against the parser. Although I suspect that this change will prevent a node from being knocked out entirely by the attack, I also suspect that the attack could still be used to "temporarily hang" a node. (Short version explanation: use the production order of the parser to craft "worst case parse time" expressions and then spam them at a node.)
... and even more! Thanks for everything so far!!