Just to throw it out there, what about a 2% mining tax instead of a 2% bootstrap?
Quite possibly, especially if there is a better method for crowdfunding or donations or something for specific targeted projects beyond the initial bootstrap. I think we're getting to the level of detail where we'd need to work out a real budget, which would require more involvement than just you and me. That may or may not be a pointless exercise, since it is isn't clear there is anyone other than the two of us even open to considering the whole approach.
It's kind of sad... Monero has attracted some of the smartest minds I've seen in cryptocurrencies and cryptography, but we don't have enough money to pay to developed even 1/4 of the things we need to. It costs about $100-150 an hour to contract a decent programmer to hack (and please don't start on the value of third world programmers, if you're talking about that you've probably never used them), or $800-1200 a day. I would estimate that ByteCoin put in about a half million USD to get their project off the ground, which is probably why they've been trolling us so hard. But, the fact of the matter is, we're either paying out of pocket or (like me) working completely for free.
Monero is about a lot more than pumping and dumping -- it uses many of the features that have been desired from core devs over time like privacy and faster/more secure EdDSA (which uses Schnorr signatures). But there are major, major architectural overhauls to the core code that need to be done to give it even a fraction of the usability of BTC, and I fear we won't be able to afford that. I suspect we need at least 0.25-0.50M USD per year to keep things moving along smoothly, and we're not getting close to $21K USD a month in donations.
Monero is about a lot more than pumping and dumping -- it uses many of the features that have been desired from core devs over time like privacy and faster/more secure EdDSA (which uses Schnorr signatures). But there are major, major architectural overhauls to the core code that need to be done to give it even a fraction of the usability of BTC, and I fear we won't be able to afford that. I suspect we need at least 0.25-0.50M USD per year to keep things moving along smoothly, and we're not getting close to $21K USD a month in donations.
