Interesting thoughts, @furion. I'm glad you are putting this out there for the Steemit community to discuss.

What about having a verified username? Something similar to what Twitter does with their verified accounts of public interest? There are plenty of social media platforms that allow a user to verify an account simply off of an email address which corresponds to the username they want to use.

To be honest, I don't think I'm a fan of the highest bidder bond. Squatters are like spammers, annoying and problematic. However, making a business pay a bond for a username which they should be able to control just doesn't seem right.