@venture709 28 January 2020 more from that month

Meeting Halfway

Payout splitting as reputation. There has been quite the stir made in the BCH community regarding the soft fork which many deem to be coercive because it leaves out perfectly valid blocks (work) if they did pay to the correct person. To me, this is equivalent to not recognizing perfectly good gold or silver, just because it has the face of a different ruler on it, or has a rooster (French) instead of a dude slaying a dragon (English). There are many proponents of the temporary protocol change and many against. Many have good intentions, and their ideas may work for a time. I however believe that the protocol change does not need to be coercive as a soft fork would be, and does not need to be a hard fork as others believe is best. However, hard forks are not good for communities. This is important to recognize. They are barriers and create a new language that is difficult to translate well. Communities are better if they are unified, and I think, for the most part, the BCH community certainly is on quite a few things. Want preserve sovereign principles Want free markets Want digital cash Want number go up If you want all of these things, great, so does the person in the other camp, as well as the person who can't make up their mind about which is better. Try not to forget that. I would argue that it is easier, as well as more effective to use principles of sovereignty to move the needle and allow free markets to do the work. It does not need to happen all at once, but certainly inching toward it, or at least meeting the ability for individuals to experiment should be embraced. A valid solution would meet the following criterion: Individualize risk Miner never has to touch coins (donation of work/time not funds) Decentralize choice Distribute rewards fairly The first, and the freest way to implement ¾ what is being proposed without coercing, is to just allow miners to split their coin earnings. This would be a non-restrictive soft fork (upgrade?), where the network would assume that everyone was taking 100% of their earnings up to the point where the fork goes into effect, is used, and the first block is mined in that configuration. I am relatively new to the BCH space and have never set up a miner myself, but I would assume that somewhere there is a deposit address or configuration file with the private key. Well, given that we have that information, I would assume that it would not be too big of a jump to get to a list of possible output files and their relative percentages, which must equal 100. Or perhaps, because we're dealing with monies, it must define a list of addresses and amounts. As an example, if the config were written in .yml, it might look something like this: payout: - address: bitcoincash:qzgdxe76ys56ua4yjxwvk9ka5rktjvrj3ge36rmmtx amount: 546875000 - address: bitcoincash:qzgdxe76ys56ua4yjxwvk9ka5rktjvrj3ge36rmmtx amount: 78125000 This would not prevent the free-rider problem, but at least it would create a paper trail, so that if people in the future wanted to know where to put their funds such that they would be put to good use, then they could weigh the protocol level transactions against the contributions made by the developers paid out from these addresses. (Surely by now there is a way to tie commits to bitcoin addresses such that the contribution in code can be met with bitcoin contributions.) If the code written makes its way into production, then this is a metric of success against which an individual's donation efficacy can be measured. A price, so to speak. This allows an individual to set their own risk tolerance, decentralize the amount where the funds go because the miner itself decides how much work/time on the hash level is being donated to someone else. I am unsure about the technical feasibility of this, but I would assume that because a division is being proposed then something similar except with malleable inputs should be possible. No one knows what the right answer is. No system knows how to distribute rewards fairly. It is right to recognize others' contributions and a bounty program is certainly necessary to maintain the system through time. There is no need to contradict your own principles in the process especially when there is no need to. There may come a time when that is actually necessary, but this decision does not seem like the time. Move one step toward your friend in an effort to make him your brother. Step away to assuredly become his enemy. I believe this is an easy first step to take on the protocol level, which will give us more information and will not compromise the sovereignty of the individual. Give the idea more time, more thought, more experiments. Let all of the flowers bloom.