Also, since the pool is open source, someone could remove this fee? BTW, the fee is paid to the pool or orphan foundation?
Good questions, I have also wondered the same things.
West, thanks, I think the dev should use your explanation to fill the "Help guide" section at the pool which is currently empty and that's what seeksilence was asking about, the lack of instructions.
If you think you can write to that one, great, if not, keep looking.
... But what if I can't write to anyone? I would think I am a strange case, but according to the ratio of pool users who didn't write a letter vs. the ones who did, it seems I am in the majority. If you think there are miners who don't care about that and only care about money, actually that is directly related with their profits. So one would think even them would take a minute to do it, at least sloppily.
I like to help children in need and other causes and I like "automatic" helping very much, like BBP already does with tithe blocks. I actually donate to UNICEF automatically every month, and I also donate to some local organization. But I have never written anything to anyone, I just speak with my money. It's arguable what would bring a child more happiness, a lovely letter or new shoes. But I don't see a reason to be forced to do both. I have social anxiety and also a real fear of writing something bad in a letter, because I get nervous if I have to relay my thoughts to an innocent child, because I have personality issues, dark thoughts etc. In real life I am already not good with family, neighbors etc.
So do you (and pool admin) think that it's all right to force pool users into doing something they don't want and have low quality letters, compared to having someone who would be delighted to write a letter (or two) without forcing them? The fee has increased from 2% to 6%, which is starting to get crazy, and I already imagine it being higher in the near future. Also, for me it wouldn't be a problem if the fee went to charity, because I would see that as kind of an increased donation for those who don't want to write letters, but it seems the fee is only going to the pool, since at the orphan foundation address I only see tithe blocks payouts from mining. I see no use in that and I will be switching to solo mining if another pool doesn't emerge soon.
The dev has stated that he is against us being a "mining organization" which is why I understand his actions with the pool website, but I want to remind him that that's a pool website. Yup, it's in the domain name even. While I haven't seen a coin website with such awesome features, they don't belong there. Ideally they should all be in the Qt wallet and I already said that the higher cost/time involved with it is not a real issue when a pro Qt designer could do that when he is hired for the redesign anyway - it would not be hard to make a few more windows with some server communication.
Then, if the dev thinks that writing a letter every 60 days is a real requirement to be able to use (or just to mine) BiblePay, then by all means, make it mandatory. It could be done in the wallet and if the user has written a letter, they could mine, if not, they couldn't mine at all, which can be controlled since the miner is integrated with the wallet. I am not for this (nor against it), but it's important to see a big difference here: in this case, it would be a BiblePay rule for everyone and if somebody doesn't want to do it, they can't mine BiblePay and that's it. But not like it is now - the rule is enforced by one pool, which is not an exclusive way to use or mine BBP, so solo miners have an indisputable advantage of 6% over pool miners, and so will have miners on a new pool. Moreover, I think miners shouldn't be responsible or required to write letters or anything of the sort. They already have a steady role in keeping the BiblePay network secure and they already donate every 10th block to charity, which is not meager. They don't have to take up another role if they don't want to. They can, but they shouldn't need to. I understand that we are in very early stages, nevertheless it's obvious that it's the regular users who should be the ones using those features, so not miners, but Christians, investors, enthusiasts etc. And what is absurd is that there are probably users who are not miners who don't even know about letter writing, but they would be glad to write a letter only if they knew about that feature!
The dev has also recently changed the masternode share of the profit to be heavily against miners, which confirms his view of things, along with the "mining organization" statement and the constantly increasing fee for miners. Although I like the current proposed [miner/masternode/charity/IT] percentage distribution, I realized what is happening here, especially with the recent retirement/colored coins proposal. It seems like the current state of things does not adhere to the developer's vision when he started the coin and I am not saying this in a bad way. I agree with that, since the main focus right now is heavily on mining, as if this is some generic coin. But why would it not be possible to completely change the focus and the rules by a consensus? Of course there are other ways to secure the network except mining, but I'm not suggesting such a drastic change. I will continue after the following quote:
One benefit of having this particular feature is we would attract outside investors that would need to buy BBP in order to have the ability to buy rBBP and they also potentially download the wallet and be users and might have a tendency to be long term holders.
Um, actually... Why wouldn't BBP be rBBP?! Kinda. Obviously it can't be some of the things outlined in the idea, but most of them it can. Isn't it better to attract investors directly with BBP coin, rather than with some invisible internal asset? That way BBP could be seen at CoinMarketCap, exchanges and everywhere else, but rBBP would hardly make an impact. And I think having an asset inside an asset is too convoluted anyway, even for a technical user, not to mention an average user. And if the coin wants to be for the masses, Christians, philanthropists etc, then I think it shouldn't be made too hard to use (which is in line with my argument about charity features in Qt). You have my support if BiblePay itself could be made in any way more in line with your idea of rBBP, or even generally your revised idea of what BiblePay should and should not be. I think we are still a very early and small community and that even bigger changes could still be made without dissent. The past has shown that the majority of users were OK with the changes, even when they caused some issues.
Thank you for reading, I hope I have inspired some discussion.
