What would happen if the miner reward was proportional to the difficulty?
As more and more people mine, the reward would be bigger and bigger, allowing for a more fair distribution of coins for late comers, IMO.
I think a good formula for miner reward would be reward=0.01√difficulty (square root to discourage inflation), which would give 5569 bitcoins right now, or 24 million bitcoins per year at the current difficulty.
Of course the early adopters would not like such a system, but they are the minority IMO. As long as the majority benefits from such a system, I think we can do it.
as a concept for a new altcoin:
early adoptors wouldnt care. because in the early days there wouldnt be that many people so the hashrate would be small. thus early adopters wouldnt be spending much to mine it.
you might want to start with a lower reward to incentivise people to power up to get more reward.
no point starting large and getting larger