You lead and maybe I will follow

The dev-tax proposal was made by some mining pools last week and the community back-lash has been quite extensive. It is safe to say that the proposal as is will not get majority hashpower. A majority hashpower is what you need if you want to change the coin basic principles.

The btc.top and other pools that actually made the announcement possibly even expected this. They never had a majority hashpower, even ignoring that pools and miners are not the same people. Why would they do this then, you ask?

What we observed is a fork in communities without a fork in code or chain.

I'm not sure if people realized this yet. But this may be very interesting going forward.

As I wrote in my previous post:

There is one team that is asking for real funding and their reasons are based on a questionable business model.

This team, it is very clear to people having followed this weeks posts, is the ABC team. They are also the only ones in favor of this dev-tax.

Here we have deadalnix (the ABC spokesperson): (post / spanish)

They asked myself several times to implement such a measure in Bitcoin ABC directly, to which I responded every time that such an initiative needed to come from the miners as there is obvious conflict of interest if devs decide to take away money from miners and pay themselves with it.

As we can see in a public video from him, the original request for this kind of funding is also from Amaury. While not a smoking gun, this quoted paragraph gives a strong impression that the miners have responded to such requests by stating ABC should just change their software to make it mandatory. Everyone knows that the market would react badly to this idea, and Amaury states he didn't take that risk.

But now some mining pools made the first move, ABC takes it all the way:

I propose that the control of the key needs to be in the hands of people who have proven they work in the best interest of Bitcoin Cash, even during rough times, have a commitment to infrastructure and a proven track record, such as Jonald Fyookball, Mengerian and myself. 

Please read this and realize that this man, today, has a lot of power to decide what goes into Bitcoin Cash. Does that make you feel happy?

So, what about Jonald and Mengerian?

Lets start with Jonalds "facts":

Bitcoin ABC (the lead implementation of Bitcoin Cash) could not have unilaterally decided to fund themselves as it would have been political suicide, even though this had been requested before.

Ok, these guys obviously coordinated their stories.

We need to get bigger before we worry about things like “decentralization” and “purity of protocol”. 

At least he is being frank. I agree that those values would be killed. The rest of the community is not so eager to kill those in order for Jonald to get a nice paycheck, though.

I take responsibility for “pushing” and encouraging this.

Thank you for your frank admitting of where you stand on this, Jonald.

Mengerian wrote a post here too. As yet another poster using a pseudonym it is curious to see that Amaury suggested him to be part of the inner circle. Reading his post it is clear that the man is well versed in writing non-committal sentences. It feels like reading the writings of a politician.

Is it a “Tax”? This question has been asked 1000 times, but here’s a different perspective: If anything should be compared to a tax, it is the block reward itself.
To the extent that the block reward is a “tax”, the Infrastructure Funding Plan is not a new tax, but a reallocation of the existing one. 

But, lets focus on the mans beliefs, not his great writing skills.

This would effectively make it a consensus rule.

Here we have the most important part. Orphaning blocks that don't pay him and his friends are no longer to be called Bitcoin Cash. That is his opinion. This is what the man honestly beliefs.

Leaders should represent those they intent to lead

There is no point in linking to the hundreds or thousands of posts, tweets, articles and blogs that all conclude the same thing. The sharp opposite of the above quoted people.

The Bitcoin Cash community is not really divided, in fact it is amazingly coherent. The only ones that really want this dev-tax are the ones that have designed it and are the ones that will benefit from it.

These people claim to represent us. As Jonald called ABC: "the lead implementation of Bitcoin Cash".

I ask you, my dear reader, to consider if this is really the team you want to be the leader. If there is a way we can make very clear to them that they do what the holders want, miners and people don't just follow them. That is not how Bitcoin works.

As closing, all 3 blogs had the same sentiment in almost the same wording.

Also, doing it without orphaning will fail because the contributions from individual miners will be meager, and pools cannot do this at scale because they will quickly become uncompetitive.

This is why this idea will never work. If ABC releases a client that forces this, then I'm willing to pay a developer to make a fork release for miners to mine with. Removing only the part that forces this uncompetitive behavior. ABC does not call the shots.

The holders call the shots. The miners decide with hashpower. This is the power of Bitcoin Cash.