I personally like the ambiguity that this system would introduce. A good auction system would produce a winning bid as close to "true market value" as possible and IMO sniping undermines that goal. This "blockchain" system would have a lot of unknowns that would be hard to game and thus encourage people to place their "max bid" well before the end of the auction.
Also, in many auctions there is no "end time". The auction continues until nobody is willing to beat the highest bid (aka "going once going twice SOLD!!!"). Perhaps another option would be to end the auction after X blocks have passed since the last highest bid?
That's an excellent point. The timed auction is the source of sniping in the first place.
In a live auction, the highest rate of bid arrival is at the beginning as the true floor value is being set. It ends only when, in the auctioneer's opinion (or in the signals of the last active bidders), there are no more bids.