One aspect of the Miner Enforced Infrastructure fund that I haven't heard much about is that it's a barrier to entry for smaller mining operations that don't have the scale of the larger ones. It's essentially reducing margins by over 10% in a commodity business. That's lethal. It's like combining regulatory hurdles with taxation.
If a member can't opt out of paying without leaving their community or stopping participation, it's functionally a tax. Semantics about if it's a "tax" might be fun and all, and it might be cool to think about how implementing this takes advantage of BCH/BTC price differences, but one very important thing is how the system dynamics are being rearranged.
Instead, if "the community" has decided it's virtuous for miners to contribute to software development, the developers and miners should start establishing methods to signal community conventions. I'm short for time, so I only have one example for now:
If a mining pool is using a particular software distribution, that distribution could hardcode contribution addresses into the software they distribute. Then, the mining pool would have to take deliberate action to remove or alter that contribution, which would make it public they are exploiting the commons. This could become a focus point for debate about whether or not the action was warranted. Other software implementations could do similar things as well. The "value" of leaving the software a 3rd-party is leveraging unmodified starts to become the market price (cost of removal + loss of good will from community vs. value gained). The dynamics of this start to become more information markets can use, not merely another set of resource allocations.
i don't understand why this wasn't the FIRST option they proposed? or maybe it was. i'm still very new here, and I understand this debate goes back to 2018?