BTW, I posted this idea earlier than the post I saw from AM that described it the way JM did. I don't know if AM got it from me
I had the idea since 2013. I had some posts in rpietila's earlier threads alluding to it. But I don't care who had the idea first. I care who is first to achieve it in a real coin. And put strong, scalable anonymity in it too.
The problem is, this tells you the goal but not how to get there, and even more importantly stay there. Remember, Bitcoin started with a miner in a wallet. Eventually mining become professionalized and the wallet miner was ripped out because no one used it. Although a wallet miner is pretty pointless with ASICs, the miner was ripped out earlier, during the GPU era. Another option could have been to add GPU support to it.
Getting the PoW correct was an essential requirement, but not sufficient by itself to get everyone to mine.
P.S. I edited my prior posts in this thread.