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Original title: "Many mainstream project development funds are facing "burning out", should BCH impose miner tax (forced donation)?"
Original source: Plain Language Blockchain "A good tax collector should regard collecting taxes as plucking goose feathers. The best method is to pluck the most feathers while minimizing the goose's painful cries." - French Finance Minister Jean-Baptiste Corbett.
Recently, if we talk about the two most popular things, the first one is definitely Fcoin's bankruptcy (or running away) announcement, and the second one is probably BCH. The topic of miner tax has aroused heated discussions in the entire circle, and also pushed BCH to the forefront. Many people who don't know the truth have seen a lot of excitement, but they are still confused. Should BCH's miner tax be collected?
01
Before talking about this topic, let’s first take a quick look at what exactly happened.
1. Proposal: On January 22, Jiang Zhuoer of Litecoin Mining Pool published a blog post, announcing a "BCH Infrastructure Financing Plan" and claiming that a proposal will be added to the BCH upgrade in May to donate 12.5% of BCH's block rewards in the next 6 months to developers, and domineeringly shouted "BCH mining pools that don't cooperate, you will orphan blocks!"
The reason why they are so confident is that Wu Jihan, Yang Haibo, and Bitcoin Jesus support this proposal. The combined computing power of the mining pools held by these people has exceeded half of the BCH computing power.
2. Opposition: After the proposal was issued, it was inevitable that it would be opposed. Some miners left a message on the chain saying "No!!", and some BCH developers also expressed different opinions on the proposal. Many users in the BCH community also expressed their willingness to oppose, especially expressing strong uneasiness about the fact that "four people made the final decision" on such a big thing as BCH taxation. What about decentralization?
3. Current situation: BCH chief Amaury has an extremely tough attitude - "ABC has created more than 1 billion US dollars in revenue for miners, so why are they collecting taxes now? What's wrong?! Isn't it natural?!"
Roger V was vague - "For now, Bitcoin.com will not support any plans unless there is more consensus in the ecosystem that the risk of chain forks can be negligible."
Jiang Zhuoer said: "If there are too many people who oppose the miner donation model, we can start with the Nobel Prize model (an incentive idea proposed by the big V Lightning)."
02
The fundamental reason for the proposal is simple - developers have no money! You can't always let the cow work and not let the cow eat grass! Besides, this is not the first time BCH has made such a suggestion.
At the BCH industry conference in Hong Kong in May 2018, a developer proposed to raise funds from mining pools to develop the BCH project, which caused great controversy and was called a "shocking forced donation incident" by some opponents. When asked, "What if 75% of the computing power voted to donate, but the remaining 25% disagreed?" The solution given was similar to this time - "the majority computing power forces the minority computing power to obey", of course, this proposal was eventually shelved.
Last June, Bitcoincash.org and other BCH organizations launched a fundraising campaign for a total of 800 BCH (about $350,000), but after half a month, they didn’t even get half of the amount, which was a bit embarrassing. Later, some BCH users posted various sad stories on the forum, and finally they almost raised the target amount.
The reason for this proposal is that, in addition to the estimated economic difficulties faced by the development team, the main problem is that Jiang Zhuoer, Roger V and other big miners want to find a long-term and stable way to support BCH developers. As we all know, BCH has always been a community donation + part-time development model since its birth. It may be OK in the short term, but it is not a long-term solution to compete with BTC in this marathon. The sustainability and stability of the funding model are not high, and most developers are part-time, so it is difficult to focus all their energy on development, which will affect the development progress and ecological process of BCH. Therefore, the lack of a long-term, stable income model that allows developers to develop with peace of mind and make money has long been a thorn in the hearts of these BCH's largest stakeholders. This "miner tax" can be seen as an attempt, or a "test" to see how loud the goose calls when plucking feathers.
03
What are the pros and cons? Pros and cons are actually a matter of opinion, and often the butt determines the head. Supporters and opponents of BCH are often fighting for their own interests. So, it is better to jump out of the BCH circle and see what attitudes other industry leaders have towards this miner tax:
Litecoin Lee - Safety First Li Qiwei thinks that although you are a big boss, your computing power is still not enough. What will you do if BTC computing power comes to you? Isn’t CSW still eyeing you? He can take action at any time! Besides, your decision is too centralized! The impact is not good!
“Currently, the miners’ alliance only has about 28% of the computing power of the BCH network, and unless they call on more computing power, they cannot enforce this soft fork. This may lead to many forks, and adding such a centralized feature in this mandatory way will set a bad precedent. If this soft fork passes, it will be very unstable because large BTC miners will be motivated to conduct a 51% attack. They can switch to BCH and then mine 11 blocks in a row, and then they get all the BCH, which is at least 14% more profitable than mining BTC.”
Vitalik - Is 2020 so mysterious?!
Vitalik expressed his concern and opposition through a series of tweets.
“I have to admit, we’re not even a month into what Mark Lutter calls ‘weird 2020,’ and weird things are happening.”
“12.5% of the BCH block reward is directed from miners to “a Hong Kong company”. The article labels it as a voluntary form, but in fact, it is a mandatory soft fork.”
“How can the Hong Kong company ensure that the money is used for development?”
“I disagree with this market-for-consensus idea because it has bad equilibrium and can easily lead to entrenched interests.”
CSW - This is income, not donation
CSW looks at this from a legal perspective -
“You can’t ‘donate’ to people like protocol developers.
ABC and other entities such as Core are common law partnerships.
Any money you give them is income, income that should be legally taxed – they are not a charity.
The money, funds, and virtual currency given to them is not a donation, but income.
04
How other projects solve this problem Before you want to comment on the BCH incident, you can first look at how other projects do it.
BTC - When Satoshi Nakamoto first invented BTC, like many inventions, he spent money to build servers, write code, and test... Of course, he also quietly mined millions of coins, although these coins were worthless at the time.
After Satoshi Nakamoto retired, the decentralized nature of Bitcoin made the source of development funds a problem. Gavin Andresen, Satoshi’s designated successor, had encountered funding problems. He also launched a fundraising campaign in the community, but the effect was not good, so he turned to external help. Later, with the intervention of external funds and forces, the problem was basically solved. But similarly, the development direction of Bitcoin fell into the hands of BlockSteam, the financier behind the scenes. A series of historical processes such as insisting on not expanding the capacity, using the Lightning Network, and the BCH split are more or less related to the relatively centralized development funding.
ETH & LTC - Ethereum initially raised 12 million Ethereums and put them into the Ethereum Foundation. It has been running relatively well so far. Due to the huge increase in ETH, the Ethereum Foundation has been in a state of "not lacking money".
In comparison, LTC is a bit bleak. It is also operated by a foundation. Most of the time, the money donated to the foundation by Charlie Lee, the founder of Litecoin, accounted for 80% of the total funds. Later, as Charlie Lee's donations decreased, the Litecoin Foundation was often troubled by a shortage of development funds.
EOS & BSV——The underlying development of these two projects is relatively centralized, but the good thing is that they are really not short of money!
EOS earned more than 7 million ETH through a year-long pre-sale, and later cashed out most of it at a high price, leaving it with tens of billions of US dollars. It really is so arbitrary that it can hire whoever it wants and pay whatever salary it wants!
BSV’s partner Calvin Ayre is a well-known Australian billionaire. The development company behind it, Nchain, has hundreds of blockchain patents. The maintenance costs of the patents alone are said to be several million US dollars each year, so developer salaries are a piece of cake.
Zcash also has a developer fund, which was established in 2016 and has the well-known "Founder's Reward", which is 20% of the block rewards obtained from miners and is distributed to Zcash's founders and investors to help the project continue to develop for a period of 4 years, which will expire in November 2020.
But it is precisely this high proportion of "taxation" or profit sharing that has caused Zcash to be criticized and has never recovered.
What’s even more frightening is that the founder’s reward will be cancelled in a few months, and Zcash will face the dilemma of having no money to continue research and development. Some time ago, Zcash passed an improvement proposal (ZIP1014) through governance, still taking 20%, but the distribution method among ECC (Zcash Development Company) Foundation and other parties has changed. It’s basically a change of name, and the tax will continue to be collected from miners to maintain the progress of project development.
Data shows that the influx of developers into the crypto ecosystem has stagnated at this stage, and the vast majority of developers are in the Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystems.
Source: The State of Cryptocurrency Adoption in 2019 Currently, there are about 7,000 active cryptocurrency developers per month. In comparison, NodeJS has more than 4 million developers and Android has 6 million developers. It can be said that this industry is still too weak to attract talent.
Developers play a big role in the development of a project, but they don’t get the most benefits in the end. What do you think of this phenomenon? Please leave your comments in the comment section.
Source link: weixin.qq.com |
