There needs to be a method in the code to limit the hash. The system MUST be open source, and must be usable on current hardware. The less power for the hash the better. Ideally, CPU mining would be awesome simply because of the easy availability of potential CPU miners. If I can make a chain that requires virtually no power, adoption should be incredibly feasible.
The idea I had was to eliminate the nonce from the hash, to some extent.
If I remove the nonce and replace it with unix time, I can limit miners to one hash per second, per bitcoin address or block modification.
Difficulty can be scaled to make this fair
You can pre-mine seconds, but the block will only be accepted in the appropriate time frame; probably x-many seconds after the block time. Pre-generating a block will create a block that is only valid for the transactions within.
As such, blocks with the most recent transactions will be the ones accepted by the network over pre-mined blocks.
There are ways to beat the system, but I'm thinking about ways to get around that.
Include the nonce to prove that the hashing was done after a certain time period. Still leaves the question of how exactly to rate limit. I was just posting to correct the train carrying your thought.