This is brilliant. Of course there's still a lot of work to figure out if it's technically feasible and resistant to manipulation, concentration of power etc. But it could solve a lot of the problems Bitcoin will face going forward.

This change is significant enough to warrant a new genesis block rather than forking the current chain. This leaves the problem of initial distribution. Mining serves the purposes of both transaction validation and initial distribution, so if validation rights depend on current possession it will obviously be problematic.

I think this will work best together with, rather than instead of, hash-based mining. Blocks are confirmed with hashing as normal; this is enough for casual double-spend attempts. When a block is old enough, stakeholders can sign it. If a major attacker tries to build an alternative branch, clients will reject it because it conflicts with a branch already signed by stakeholders. This will create a much lower mining requirements for a given level of security.


I'll go as far as saying that if this pans out and is indeed novel, you deserve a place right next to Satoshi in the annals of Bitcoin.
(Edit Nov 28 2013: I retract that last statement... Sure, it's a great idea and all, but a place in the hall of fame requires a bit more than that. Also I'm not sure how novel the idea really is.)