Arguably the reduction in 1 block commitment security might have useful benefits in security practices. 
I've wondered before if some kind of chameleon hash couldn't be used for anti-censorship. E.g. miner thinks he's mining transaction A but no no no there really exists a transaction B that he equally mined... but I've never found a way to make it work. Maybe I should think about using a proof of knoweldge.
I guess the biggest problems I can see with your idea are that:
(1) No one currently cares. Pools, for example, can rob their miners undetectably... they _could_ do things to prove that they were not cheating, but none do. Miners could use P2Pool which can't rob miners, but most do not. I imagine the story will be the same for cloud mining services, and they'll be able to use even more arguments about reputation and such to claim their honesty.
(2) The standard Mike Hearn argument: Part of the reason that Bitcoin is viable is that its very comprehensible (at least in broad strokes, if not for the subtle details) to basically any technically minded person, invoking some kind of zero knoweldge thing to _enable_ a specific kind of cheating is far more complex than anything currently in Bitcoin, even if it is a neat idea.
I guess the counter argument to (2) is that a lot of people initially believe its possible for miners (e.g. mining in a pool) to steal work, and it takes some effort to convince them that they can't. Your idea would, in some ways, make mining more intuitive. I suspect its not possible to avoid breaking pooling, even in its most harmless forms, since anything that preserved pooling for payment would by definition be proving that the right parties were getting paid.
I've wondered before if some kind of chameleon hash couldn't be used for anti-censorship. E.g. miner thinks he's mining transaction A but no no no there really exists a transaction B that he equally mined... but I've never found a way to make it work. Maybe I should think about using a proof of knoweldge.
I guess the biggest problems I can see with your idea are that:
(1) No one currently cares. Pools, for example, can rob their miners undetectably... they _could_ do things to prove that they were not cheating, but none do. Miners could use P2Pool which can't rob miners, but most do not. I imagine the story will be the same for cloud mining services, and they'll be able to use even more arguments about reputation and such to claim their honesty.
(2) The standard Mike Hearn argument: Part of the reason that Bitcoin is viable is that its very comprehensible (at least in broad strokes, if not for the subtle details) to basically any technically minded person, invoking some kind of zero knoweldge thing to _enable_ a specific kind of cheating is far more complex than anything currently in Bitcoin, even if it is a neat idea.
I guess the counter argument to (2) is that a lot of people initially believe its possible for miners (e.g. mining in a pool) to steal work, and it takes some effort to convince them that they can't. Your idea would, in some ways, make mining more intuitive. I suspect its not possible to avoid breaking pooling, even in its most harmless forms, since anything that preserved pooling for payment would by definition be proving that the right parties were getting paid.