Mitigating 51% attacks without sacrificing much openness

About 51% attacks on Bitcoin-style proof-of-work systems.

Closing the door to participation in mining a little by including some kind of "trusted" bit in participation will make more sense as participation shifts from fully chain-aware wallets to intermediaries. The best way to do this might be closing participation in the public chain lengthening process, perhaps by all the current mining pools defining a closed communications channel and thereby shutting out newcomers, or at least vetting them a little. That way, if some major player with the ability to purpose hardware to deliver a 51% attack wanted to, they'd also need to join the club. Something like American anti-trust rules could be introduced, such as, a pool may not submit more than ten of every fifty blocks. With SMPPS, a pool that got lucky and is getting close to its limit can trivially distribute work for other pools instead to avoid forced downtime.

A portion could be reserved for non-members, but all non-members would have to share it; that would allow non-members to participate without having to sign up, and give an alternative for a big pool that doesn't want to do work assigned by another pool. The coalition would set or change the non-member portion by agreement amongst themselves.

Apparently DeepBit is very close to doing 50% of the work right now; instituting an anti-monopoly framework makes sense as a simple defensive measure.

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