It occurred to me that if there were some way to encourage miners to recruit more miners, we could increase the base of miners and achieve a wider distribution.
As it stands, miners are disincentivized to attract more miners - it just makes mining harder to have new miners.
If we turned that on it's head and were able give miners a downstream - say somewhere between 1% and 10% of the rewards of new miners they attract, it could lead to a pyramid, with a large base.
Possible to implement? I think so. Let's say the address receiving a coinbase transaction (mined reward) requires a signed key and in order for the block to be valid, it must award x% of reward to the key signer.
Miners then will have an incentive to introduce new miners, because they can create a key for them and will then get a % of all of their rewards.
How to generate the first keys? Either have a master key, and create 100 lucky miners at level 1, or maybe any mining address that has received coinbase rewards in excess of X is automatically entitled to sign keys for other miners.