This is what I did this week: the MinCen Protocol. The idea is design a cryptocurrency that behaves like a centralized one, but can disperse into fully distributed one if something goes wrong. Nature has many examples of colonies that have a queen, but if the queen dies somehow manage to re-elect a new queen that all obey. This is what the MinCen protocol tries to do: it chooses a master node that decides which is the next block when there are competing chains. Everyone then follows this decision. But if the master node tries to cheat then every miner starts looking for another master node, in such a way that individual decisions converge to a new global selection. Are you designing a new cryptocoin? give a try to the MinCen protocol
The paper and some additional comments are available in my blog here:
http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2014/03/20/mincen-a-new-protocol-to-achieve-instant-payments/
Best regards,
Sergio.
Cool! I like the analogy a lot.