1. Initial difficulty and difficulty adjustment
Would you consider a dynamic difficulty adjustment? Means the difficulty will adjust block by block instead of every 2016 or 4032 blocks. It needs limiting the adjustment range, but I saw it is working well in some of the altcoins. Considering 5 mins block interval is relatively long, dynamic adjustment will be more flexible. And you can have a much higher initial difficulty to prevent what happened to Protoshares, then let the network adjust itself and not worrying hash power too low.
2. Block mature in 6 months
It is good to prevent the cloud server, because people have to hold the bitshares for 6 months before they sell it.
But it is not effective to block pools. Pool can change the payout to p2pool, just like what 54.238.185.113 is doing now, let the rewards mature locally, instead of store in the pool. Something need to be done to block p2pool/immediate payment if you decide so.
3. Solo mining lottery
It is easy to say that the rewards is same base on math. But after 4 years of Bitcoin, everyone is used to pool mining. I would say 90% of miners would prefer 0.5 stable payment everyday instead of a chance of hitting a block every 3 months. The difficulty and hash power is changing significantly time to time, even myself want to be paid for what I am contributing to the network right now. It is small amount everyday, but I know my miner is working.
Is it possible to build an embedded p2pool inside the bitshares client with a fully optimized miner inside? The entire network working as one pool.