While this will reduce the incentive for people to create extra accounts at Steemit Inc's expense, attacks will still happen just to burn down your stake. You will still need to rely on a costly verification process to avoid that, and you can't onboard millions of people with a time consuming process.
Are there any plans to incentivize other participants in the network to carry the cost burden of creating new accounts?
We can detect abuse just fine—that isn't our issue. (That is why we have the signup approval process in place at the moment. Very few fraudulent accounts are getting through, but the UX is suboptimal.)
I have an email list of over 20K people, and was planning to bring them over to Steemit, but the approval time takes way to long, and I am affraid they will get discouraged. @sneak @steemitblog