Hey Ryan! Thanks for starting this discussion and for the ideas – great to see more community discussion on this important topic.
I think this is an interesting idea. From an implementation perspective it would mean that the Verifiable Random Function (VRF) is implemented on the Stacks layer and not on the Bitcoin side. The Bitcoin layer will not have enough information to pick the leader. I think this has security implications for consensus. I want to think about this more, my initial reaction is that there is some interesting thing here but we need to think about implementation/consensus details and pros/cons.
For the mining decentralization issue, I’ve mostly been spending time on what we’re calling “dust fee mining SIP” (it should be live on Github soon). It can increase the number of miners to 100+. The fundamental limitation that you end up with is actually Bitcoin’s bandwidth. Even with 100 unique miners (not counting pools who pools behind a single on-chain miner) you’d be taking up approx 10% of the total Bitcoin transaction bandwidth per block. I personally wouldn’t want the Stacks layer to take up more than 10% of the Bitcoin bandwidth for mining. So that gives you some upper bound on the max number of miners that can be supported with the current Bitcoin on-chain mining approach. Some mining pools proposals can push this further and make it more decentralized.
Absolutely! This is a mission driven community and so many people are willing to come together and contribute. Love being part of this community 