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.
At present, we mine about 20k XMR a day, 1% of that is 200 XMR or about $400. Can we make the the block reward to pay 1% of coins to a wallet controlled by developer? As the value of XMR increases, the reward will also decrease, making the payment almost constant or higher if XMR appreciate faster.
Thats actually a brilliant idea. Release a fork that pays part of the mining rewards automatically to the devs. If people dont like it than they dont have to use that fork. If the network splits into two, one where we have all of the devs being properly compensated and devloping appropriately, and another fork where its just some stubborn guys who dont like the proposal hording and sitting on coins that arnt being developed, than i think we know which would win out in the long run. If they want to fork and get their own devs and follow a more traditional funding model, than great we will have 2 competing cryptos that would both be pretty interesting. I might throw some capital into both.
Its not forcing people to pay you either. You provide some code, built in is what you guys want to be compensated for it, and only people who value your code more highly than what you are charging will decide to use it. Its totally fair. Just like a store putting a price tag on a product that they are selling. You either buy it or dont depending on how you feel about the price.
I obviously understand the drawbacks. We would be assailed for having an element of centralization. But i really think that when you weigh the costs and the benefits against each other, atleast superficially, we get to a point where we really really really should be
atleast talking about this.
Also obviously this would have to be temporary. The devs would need to commit to weaning off of such a system after given features are implemented or a given period of time.
