In the discussions recently about the proposed fork to compulsary miner contributions to the development of bitcoin cash, two things have been made abundantly clear:
The development teams which are responsible for producing full-node software are doing so without the certainty of a regular pay check, leaving some developers in a tough position financially as well as restricting growth of development teams.
The idea of non-voluntary miner payments does not sit well with many in the BCH ecosystem.
I don't want to get into other complicated proposals to tackle this issue, all i'll do here is propose somthing so simple it might be dismissed outright for being just that: TOO SIMPLE.
Here it goes:
Users transact and pay fees to miners, miners mine blocks and collect new coins + tx fees. Miners are running the full-node software they prefer, which is benefiting them directly by bringing a steady income.
So miners are the ones who stand the gain the most from the capabilities of full-node software.
We know this, and it naturally follows that miners would invest back into the network that is benefiting them.
The key then is how can this be voluntary yet more regular and consistent that the occasional donation?
Full-node software needs to have the option of sending a given percentage of the block reward to the dev team that wrote the software.
Naturally this makes sense as miners would want to contribute to the health of the software they are running
No need for "Shady" middle men like the hong kong corperation
Miners contribute any given percentage from 0-100. Leaving them in control.
Easy right?
...and you will also help the author collect more tips.
Why wouldn't a selfish miner turn that off?