Interesting, will take a look. Regarding your questions:
- Historically, reputation and web-of-trust models have been tried with mixed results (see PGP/GPG history)
- Proof of work for human validation can probably be gamed, useful as a potential workaround for rate limiting/DDOS mitigation though (check how Tor uses it)
- I'd be very skeptical providing my full KYC details to a new service, perhaps a host verification a-la Let's Encrypt could be useful as a Layer 1 "KYC" tier?
As a quick solution before implementing the more sophisticated suggestions in this thread, you can try getting a small cheap VPS from somewhere outside and trafficking all your traffic through it via sshuttle[1]. For example, Vultr (not an endorsement) has some with ~$3/month that should be sufficient for your case.