There is a question that I answered. That answer was accepted, and got a decent amount of points. It is also the only answer to that question. I later realized that my answer is wrong. But I now have a new answer which I believe is correct. However, giving this new answer essentially requires an overhaul, so it cannot be done in a minor edit.
If I do this overhaul in an edit (replacing the old with the new), I will essentially turn my answer into a completely different answer. I would keep the points and the "accepted" mark, but they are arguably undeserved, because those upvotes were essentially given to a different answer.
Intuitively it feels like the right thing to do is to delete my current answer (taking the hit in points) and post my new answer. I'm worried, however, that this will confuse the people who already read my old answer and voted. They might wonder "what happened to the old answer? It seemed good," without ever knowing what was wrong with it. It also might be considered valuable information for people to see why this answer is wrong, because it seems like an intuitive answer to the question that others might come up with.
Another solution is to edit the "new" answer as an amendment to the old answer, keeping both in the same post. However, this will make the answer very long and cumbersome, forcing every new person to have to trudge through a wrong explanation before they get to what I believe is the correct one.
The only other solution I can think of is to keep my old (wrong) answer, with a minor edit that informs people that it's wrong (and why), and then post the new answer as an entirely new post. However this feels like cheating, because I'm keeping the points for the old wrong answer and possibly getting more points for the new one.
What is the best thing to do in this case? Also, suppose I was in the same position but I didn't have a new answer that I believed was correct. What would be the best thing to do in that case?
