Think about a restaurant that pools tips. Management takes a slice of what the servers earn and puts it in a pot for the kitchen.
The argument that follows is always about the mechanism. What percentage, who counts as back of house, whether the dishwasher should get a share.
The servers are doing different math. They are asking what they take home on Friday, and whether Friday is still worth working.
Bitcoin has this same fight, and it will keep having it. Some background first. The people who run the machines that add new pages to Bitcoin's ledger get paid two ways. There is a fixed amount of new bitcoin created with every page, and that part is called the subsidy. Then there are the fees, which people attach to their own transactions to get included. The subsidy gets cut in half about every four years, and one day it reaches zero. That schedule was in the design from day one.
So proposals come. Redirect a slice of the reward to fund software development. Or a shared fund. Or some piece of work nobody is paying for.
My view is that every one of those is a question about who gets paid, dressed in engineering. The mechanism is the vehicle. So I read them in a fixed order. Who receives less. What do they stop doing once they receive less. Only after those two do I look at how the split would work.
There is a second thing worth watching. Funding development out of the reward that pays the machines changes who development answers to. Today the people writing the software and the people running the machines are paid by different things. Put them on one payroll and that gap closes.
The strongest case against me is one I take seriously. Some work needs funding that no single participant will pay for alone. Review, testing, documentation, the boring parts. Everyone benefits and nobody has the individual reason to cover it. Calling that distributional waves away a coordination problem that is sitting right there.
I would drop this view on evidence. Show me a network that redirected part of the reward paying its machines toward development, then ran that way for years. No drop in the security work being done, nobody walking away.
What that reward buys on Bitcoin is machines and electricity, and that is what makes the ledger expensive to rewrite. Money moved out of it buys something else. The people who notice first are the ones who leave.
if this gave you a way to read the next proposal Zap ⚡
The argument that follows is always about the mechanism. What percentage, who counts as back of house, whether the dishwasher should get a share.
The servers are doing different math. They are asking what they take home on Friday, and whether Friday is still worth working.
Bitcoin has this same fight, and it will keep having it. Some background first. The people who run the machines that add new pages to Bitcoin's ledger get paid two ways. There is a fixed amount of new bitcoin created with every page, and that part is called the subsidy. Then there are the fees, which people attach to their own transactions to get included. The subsidy gets cut in half about every four years, and one day it reaches zero. That schedule was in the design from day one.
So proposals come. Redirect a slice of the reward to fund software development. Or a shared fund. Or some piece of work nobody is paying for.
My view is that every one of those is a question about who gets paid, dressed in engineering. The mechanism is the vehicle. So I read them in a fixed order. Who receives less. What do they stop doing once they receive less. Only after those two do I look at how the split would work.
There is a second thing worth watching. Funding development out of the reward that pays the machines changes who development answers to. Today the people writing the software and the people running the machines are paid by different things. Put them on one payroll and that gap closes.
The strongest case against me is one I take seriously. Some work needs funding that no single participant will pay for alone. Review, testing, documentation, the boring parts. Everyone benefits and nobody has the individual reason to cover it. Calling that distributional waves away a coordination problem that is sitting right there.
I would drop this view on evidence. Show me a network that redirected part of the reward paying its machines toward development, then ran that way for years. No drop in the security work being done, nobody walking away.
What that reward buys on Bitcoin is machines and electricity, and that is what makes the ledger expensive to rewrite. Money moved out of it buys something else. The people who notice first are the ones who leave.
if this gave you a way to read the next proposal Zap ⚡
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