Yeah the proof of work is probably the less elegant aspect of it all, I can agree with that. But theoretically you could replace by any other function that's difficult to compute but easy to verify. Maybe it's just a solution in search for a problem.
I don't understand how that would fix proof of work. The whole point is that the voting power is proportional to how much computational power you are willing to burn away, in order to protect against Sybil attacks.
I was thinking that eventually we may discover a proof of work that would actually compute something useful instead of burning electricity away. One can hope at least.
