With all this mining tax and bringing in new developer talk the last couple of weeks it got me thinking. First was the funding of the developers via the IFP tax. I'm totally against this. Here's a big reason why which I commented on reddit yesterday:
Here's one I just thought of. If this tax goes in it shows that BCH can be taxed. Why not an infrastructure tax for nodes? Why not an adoption tax for people/groups spreading adoption? Why not a foundation tax for bitcoin cash foundation? Why not a collection/distribution tax for an agency to do all the above? We can call this one the BCHIRS.
Any tax also shows governments how they can tax crypto. Add an 18% tax on every tx going to a world money organization. All it would take is governments putting enough pressure on mining pools to run that tax code.
Go ahead open up Pandora's tax return.....
So what are my solutions to the developer funding? The first one is simple and not really a new idea: Miners hire developers. This is the way it was in the past. Mining pools had their own developers and probably still do. They didn't run any node version that they could download. They made their own forks of the repos and modified the code to work for them. So why can't they just hire or contract developers today? They don't need a tax for this. IF they are willing to pay 5% or 12.5% of block rewards then why not just set that money aside for salaries for developers?
Now lets take that a step farther and get all the burden off of miners. Any big player in the crypto space should do this. Exchanges and payment processors come to mind. Companies like Coinbase and Bitpay should be making a lot more than miners do so they should support development too. Spread the funding around.
The second one builds off of the first idea. Instead of hiring developers they could sponsor them. A developer wants funding he puts a proposal out for what he's going to work on and asks for a sponsorship to do it. This could work together with hiring. Not everyone does this work full time. Few full time developers getting salaries/contract payments from various companies and many part time developers getting sponsorships.
The third idea builds on the need for new, talented developers. It's something businesses have been doing to get new people for a long time: Scholarships. Not sure if scholarship is the correct term but it's the idea. Maybe grants or work studies would be more fitting but I'm going with scholarship. Companies, groups, and even individuals setting up scholarship funds for blockchain developers is a simple way to get future talent interested in and working on bitcoin cash. They Scholarships could come with a condition that a certain amount of work be put into development in the bitcoin cash ecosystem. Whether that be on the node implementations themselves or other software like wallets it's a way to get new talent working on BCH.
Funding doesn't need to be complex. Sometimes the old, simple ways work the best. The hard part is just promoting the ideas to get businesses interested. Imagine the good press for an SLP token that's a scholarship.....
That's my to bits.
