With a miners funding announcement we understand that the actual work and, well, funding targets are not decided yet. This gives the opportunity to take a peek at the kind of development work and teams we have today and what funding would do to them.
The most obvious teams are the ABC and the BU teams. They both have high numbers of nodes shipped and running on the network. It is likely that both are used by the miners doing the funding.
BU itself has received funds already a couple of years ago and they are clearly not in need of more funds. They just approved the year salary of another developer as well as many projects, like the specification documentation project. They supposedly still have millions in BTC/BCH.
ABC, then is the more likely target. ABC's Amaury has been vocal about how he thinks miners should pay him. The video from the Australia conference some months ago is very enlightening on this position.
What we learn in that video is that ABC behaves like a copy-of-Core. The software Bitcoin Core ships is seen as the place where development happens. Amaury states:
The positioning of ABC is clearly that it is reliant on Bitcoin Core. The software development being done there is leading. Innovation is difficult to impossible in Bitcoin Cash. Again, according to ABC.
But is this really the case? Is it really so difficult to split away from the people we decided to no longer want to work with 2 years ago? Many people speculated that the Bitcoin Core people write code to avoid Bitcoin from being a danger to the establishment (banks, mostly). If that is so, then what is the cost of importing their changes? We might all remember the infinite inflation bug that was inserted in Core. What happened once can happen again and we might not catch it before copying it into ABC.
Bitcoin Cash has a long list of good implementations. Some more developed than others. From the ones mentioned above and then we have BCHD, Flowee the hub and Verde. Each one having its own strengths and weaknesses. What is most important is that all of them have no problem having ownership of their respective codebases. In contrary to what we read from Amaury that this would be tantamount to suicide. I understand it likely is not a dreamjob to just follow the code from developers that don't like him or his goals. A divorce like we saw between BCH / BTC typically means one moves out and ignores the other. I expect this to get weird or even nasty at times. Is that why the BTC devs call us bad names?
Funding for a questionable business model
It seems clear from the statements made by the ABC lead that the business model for ABC is of questionable design. They openly acknowledge that most maintenance work is done by the Bitcoin Core team and the ABC people have problems fulfilling requirements on the Bitcoin Cash side as a result. We saw this most recently with the 25-unconfirmed transactions dept that ABC inherited from Core. We saw the problem with block size where miners are told they can't mine bigger than 2MB.
Any company not being able to support its customers like this in any other market would end up being replaced by one that is more competent. Instead, the miners suggest to fund them millions of dollars. How does that make sense?
What is the problem that funding solves?
This is the real question that the miners making this proposal need to answer. The Bitcoin Cash community has grown immensely over the last years. Every day new developers come in and work on their own projects. Every month more infrastructure is being created. Infrastructure in the shape of libraries, indexing software, services and much more. Really impressive stuff.
What is also infrastructure are designs and implementations like the Cash Fusion privacy innovation that is in testing today.
Immense efforts have gone into the SLP token designs. With a company at the front that has recently created a piece of infrastructure to validate and index them.
So, really, what is the problem that needs solving? There is one team that is asking for real funding and their reasons are based on a questionable business model.
People working in Bitcoin every day will be like stock-owners. This is how I expect open source developers to fund themselves after some time. If you do this every day full time, you can play the market much better than the normies can. Not a professional trader, but in this market you really don't have to be.
What problems are being solved by this hard fork?
Well, currently it's planned as a soft fork. Hard fork is under consideration.