Because over the past year, I've run every possible design through my mind, studied everything I could find from others, and have finally come to this conclusion.
Could you list all the designs that ran through your mind?
I never wrote it all down. There are so many cases and thoughts that have transpired. If you are calling out the hubris of "every possible", then granted I could have and probably did miss some possibility.
Could you narrow the scope of the question? Do you mean anonymity strategies? Do you mean network structure? Do you mean factors that impact marketing (e.g. mining for everyone without an ASIC)? And if you are not knowledgeable about how to narrow the scope, then you probably wouldn't understand a very detailed answer any way.
The question is very broad and I don't have time (energy) to write a long essay.
I did for example conclude that
amongst anonymity strategies, only one-time ring signatures appears to be viable for on chain anonymity. Up until recently I thought a variant of CoinJoin could work because most people don't care about their anonymity and the person who cares could run their own pool, but I was never able to conjure a design for a viable way to prevent the non-reputation (i.e. randomly selected) pools from being Sybil attacked. The natural paradigm is concentration of pools as I have explained upthread[1] and also because reputation is the one viable way to deal with Sybil attacks. And much credit goes to smooth because he corrected some of my wrong assumptions about one-time ring signatures.
| [1] | In that post I cited: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/11/toward-a-12-second-block-time/Which links to: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/06/19/mining/If, in the current 100 PH/s network, you are running an ASIC with 1 TH/s, then every block you have a chance of 1 in 100000 of receiving the block reward of 25 BTC, but the other 99999 times out of 100000 you get exactly nothing. Given that network hashpower is currently doubling every three months (for simplicity, say 12500 blocks), that gives you a probability of 15.9% that your ASIC will ever generate a reward, and a 84.1% chance that the ASICs total lifetime earnings will be exactly nothing. |