Since the underlying motto of crypto at large is “Don’t trust, Verify” there should be a way to accomplish this cryptographically.

The inspiration for this came from another crypto project called Decred, in which tickets must be incorporated into blocks in order for the blocks to be valid. The model used in Decred is that ticket holders can cast votes with purchased tickets and that these tickets are required by miners to form a valid block (more or less).

The solution I propose is for the Zcash foundation to create mining tickets - the difference being that these tickets are free and non voting. That is, the foundation would effectively become a zero cost cryptographic ticket issuer. By doing so, all miners will require tickets and will therefore be known. Since these tickets would need to be included in a mined block to validate the block, rogue players would no longer be able to mine in secret and there would be no penalty to honest miners. This would also lead to mechanism to allow the foundation to veto any rogue miners as unticketed blocks will not be considered valid.

The downside of doing this is that the power that the foundation wields becomes very significant which could be a good or bad thing depending on how you look at things…