If you think merge-mined chains represent proof-of-publication in a world of large pools, you misunderstand what the idea is. Fundamentally merge-mining is insecure without the participation of at least a very large fraction of the mining hashing power, which negates the scalability argument for merge-mining.
Don't forget about all the non-mining full nodes that would avoid having to carry the extra burden. Miners are getting financially rewarded for it, so it's much less of a problem for them. And hashing costs dominate up to pretty large scale anyway.That's the problem! If miners are the only ones with the data, then it's not proof of publication. Of course, this shows a flaw in Bitcoin, but at least for now we've been able to paper over that flaw...
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In fact, with some cleverness I suspect I could make the entire Mastercoin and Counterparty protocols be purely hash based and unblockable by generic mechanisms; I should put some thought into this...)
Well if the system can be hijacked, then I'm sure some clever people will do it, and this will make all the previous talk about ethical blockchain usage moot.Exactly - I know it can and will be hijacked.
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#bitcoin-wizards is where this has been discussed. Working on a more formal paper for tree chains as well. I prefer not to discuss ideas here - much better to discuss ideas on open mediums like email lists that are archived by multiple entities.
Thanks, I saw the tree chain discussion, but haven't read through it carefully yet. Are you not interested in the MMR TXO commitments idea anymore? Looking forward to the paper, I hope you finish it before you begin working on the blockchain hijacking mechanism 
TXO commitments are just a small part of solving scalability - they only help with long-term storage and actually make bandwidth scalability significantly worse. They do appear to be a good approach to blockchain sharding - tree-chains makes use of them - but the people who have been claiming they represent some scaling breakthrough misunderstand the technology. Incidentally, I'm inclined to drop the "MMR" from the approach - for TXO's as opposed to timestamping just using a variable height sparse merkle tree indexed by insertion order is simpler and results in pretty similar proof lengths as with MMR's.
As for what I'm working on... everything at once, as usual.
All this tech interrelates - I probably wouldn't have thought of the proof-of-publication theory if I hadn't been thinking about Mastercoin at the time.