You could just remove the reward, any one can mine new block out of the mem pool, if two blocks or tx are in common, a determinstic algorithm could be used to select between the two.
I agree with you. The error in most crypto is the reward, which gives rise to strategies that do not necessarily induce the desired properties. I also think that the only viable kind of crypto currency is where the validation/consensus decision is taken on a voluntary basis, the "reward" being that the system in which you are invested, keeps running correctly.
However, you still need a kind of deterministic decision *that is hard to game* (because you can do "proof of work" like calculations to get the deterministic solution in your advantage). This is why a kind of PoS signature scheme is necessary in my opinion.
@dinofelis, how many times do I have to repeat to you
that voting is not free.
Ethereum's
Casper shit is more of the same proof-of-stake (nothing-at-stake or centralization by economic weight, e.g. DPoS) nonsense. The betting stuff enables what
Vitalik refers to as "dark uncles" or "dunkles", which Vitalik incorrectly thinks will solve the nothing-at-stake problem. Also Casper has the problem that all deterministic finality PoS and Byzatine agreement systems have, which is a 33% liveness threshold which if that many validators balk or stop processing, then the chain can't move forward without a hard fork.
The only way to replace PoW is with an Inverse Commons consensus protocol, which is my new invention.