@SeanBallard
edited
The Simplest Reason against the IFP
Ownership. It's part of Hayek's thesis that formulated his work, The Fatal Conceit [of Socialism]. If we render funds earned & owned by the many Miners unto a single institution that wishes to organize these resources towards the development of the underlying BCH protocol? I believe this falls under the category of Central Planning. Part of The Fatal Conceit of Central Planning inherent in socialism is the lack of ownership over the diligent distribution of resources as a decentralized process, which Hayek called spontaneous order. Such is the maxim, nobody watches over their property better than themselves. And, if it is in the Miners best interest to fund developers? It should be made apparent in the developers effort to procure funding. Typically done through a pitch deck, marketing/sales effort, through a legitimate value proposition. Not simply granted via a fixed amount to a central organization because they have the best intention of the BCH chain in mind This is not to say that certain Dev groups & organizations don't have the best interest & intention of the BCH blockchain in mind. In fact, I think vast majority of influential contributors do. But granting intentions as enough sets a bad precedent, & lacks the feedback mechanism of taking ownership over this process towards actually being productive in the BCH blockchain's development. How this gets solved for, is via accountability/ownership of those individuals which voluntarily contribute their own resources towards benefitting BCH. They will make sure that these resources produce benefits better than if this responsibility were stripped from them via a centralized funding mechanism. Thus, given this lack of eyes & accountability on the development, the results of a centralized mechanism can be expected to be less productive than a funding mechanism which inherently has more eyes & accountability over the project. Delegating this responsibility to a central organization without a negative feedback mechanism is fertile ground for corruption & complacency, such as we see in any placement of a Government. To the developers, I understand your plight. Marketing is hard. It sucks. Nobody likes having their intentions & competency attacked, & having to feel like they need to defend them, especially when you know both to be more than adequate. But, these marketing efforts are necessary proving grounds for demonstrating your competency & intentions. This is truly the only sustainable & effective model for funding such infrastructure that is meant to maintain an open-source/public Blockchain that is to service the many humans across the world that are in need of a stable, reliable, functional, hard money that a centralized party cannot tamper with. All that said, here's to continuing the development & adoption of a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System for the world, and keeping this ecosystem alive & healthy! -Sean Ballard [sponsors]
7 comments
Hi Sean! To insert sponsors block, just type `[sponsors]` on an empty line, instead of a Markdown embed (it doesn't work, because articles do not allow Markdown)
"through a legitimate value proposition" Let me pitch on what value proposition the node development teams offer: 1) Maintenance/vigilance ie. if a new attack vector against the network is found, they go in and provide a fix quickly ie. they always have one or two devs on alert. This is what e.g. ABC has been doing since the beginning of BCH. 2) They develop the next needed upgrade features for the network - everything from single features such as a specific smart contract OP code to meet an immidiate demand in the market to more complicated upgrades/rewrites such as a much needed rewrite of the mempool acceptance code (*). 3) They make research into areas that need more exploring before deciding on a solution. For example - everybody agrees that 0-conf needs improvement to be able to serve fast casual payment with high security, but nobody is absolutely sure what approach is the best, yet. Avalanche (/Snowglobe) is just one proposal for a solution to improved 0-conf security. (*): The rewrite of the mempool acceptance code will solve many things, such as "removing the max 25 chain tx limit" in a safe & scalable manner, better fee policies and general scalability such as much higher transaction throughout & faster validation. The price for this much needed rewriting of mempool acceptance code, besides the needed man-months to do it, is also that back-porting of improvements from Bitcoin Core is no longer applicable which means that BCH node development will have to carry to cost of maintanence to a much higher degree than before, going forward! Edit: As Amaury himself has pointed out as well on Reddit: "You are missing what is probably the most important one: Bitcoin ABC has generated more than half a billion USD in miner revenue since its inception." - THIS been largely forgotten by most it seems. So, this at least answer to the value proposition.
> 1) Maintenance/vigilance ie. if a new attack vector against the network is found then how about fixing the DAA? Even before exploring 0-conf improvements, 1-conf should be at least as reliable as in other comparable chains. It's currently not. And yes: I know a new DAA is a consensus level change and wallets would need to upgrade, too. > As Amaury [...] has pointed out [...] "You are missing what is probably the most important one: Bitcoin ABC has generated more than half a billion USD in miner revenue since its inception. I feel that's a bit disingenuous of him (depending on what exactly it's intended to mean). It's not like ABC has *created* that *value*. That value is created by market demand, not by software. And that market demand is a product of many things, not just a dependable node software (it plays a good part, of course). In the same sense you could claim that ABC has used up so-and-so much energy and harmed the environmen this-and-that much.
> render funds earned & owned by the many Miners unto a single institution that wishes to organize these resources towards the development of the underlying BCH protocol... What if the "single institution" was chosen by those miners? It is their donation we are thinking about distributing, after all. It is not BCH development that is being centralized. Just a decision about where some BCH developer donations should go. The professional social engineers are working overtime to confuse miners donating funds with control of BCH. There is a bit of that involved and all they need is a bit of truth to fool people into thinking it is a very big deal even if it is not.
I'm revisiting this article. This is a great point. But, if Miners consent to such funding, why don't they just direct it towards the developers themselves? Why does it need to be implemented unilaterally across all Miners? I'm digging deeper into the Public Goods theory, in particular the Austrian Economist take on it. I feel an open blockchain may constitue a rare fulfillment of the Austrians criteria for what is a public good, and thoughts on how to best handle it. As I understand, Hopped has done great work on the topic of public goods. Thinking about distilling this into another article after giving it a deep dive. Thanks for your comment!
Not positive I understand the question, but I will try answering in case I get close. The donations from the blockchain need to be fairly distributed across all BCH miners because that makes it fair to those who do donate. If a miner could choose to send their donations to themselves or a friend it would allow the "free riders" problem we have now. That problem dis-incentivizes donating. If the miners set up a decisionmaker they trust to make the decisions on where the funding gets spent they do not have to do that work of learning what proposals are the best and they can't as easily be blamed for any perceived errors there. I bet there are other reasons as well.
When you say donations from the blockchain, do you mean the IFP coinbase fee? I love this second point. It's a point I struggle to package adequately to the community, given the ethos of Bitcoin being a trust minimized network. But in continuing to improve such a system, humans must coordinate/cooperate, wherein trust is valuable, & I believe if anyone has earned this trust it's Amaury. I've listened to many of his interviews/speeches, & his competency/rigor/motivations align well & has dutifully earned him the Benevolent Dictator of BCH lol I think much of BCHN crowd are leppers following prominent coders who felt slighted by Amaury's treatment of proposals & rather frank/terse manner of communicating.