I had to look up woo woo on wikipedia where it's said to be "a term used by magician and skeptic James Randi to denote paranormal, supernatural and occult claims". I see no such claims in BlockReduce :-)

The proposal basically deals with the bandwidth problem of on-chain scaling, trading it off against trust that miners are doing the proper cross-shard checks that they're supposed and incentivized to. What it fails to do making the whole chain fully verifiable by a typical desktop computer, as should be apparent from "the total chain will require around 8 Tb/year of storage".

Tromp, I appreciate the time that you have taken to look at BlockReduce.  One thing that I would debate is the use of the word sharding.  Although, a miner can depend upon a zone blocks work as an attestation to the correctness of the included transactions, they are not required to.  2Much like an SPV node doesn't have to keep the entire chainstate but rather just looks at a block header.  This is not sharding per say, but rather a mode of operation that a node can work within to use less resources.  I would anticipate that serious miners or pools will run and validate full state because they have an economic incentive to do so, while merchants will likely run partial state much like SPV.