Hello Rob.
First of all yeah that AWS situation sucked, 25% sounds abit low i think they could have been generous and give you a 90% discount atleast but what can you do, life has to go on.
But lets think of this from a theoretical standpoint, what gives us the maximum sponsorship dollars towards orphans: 10% from mining revenue, or a potential farm of distinct orphan-sponsoring sanctuaries? If our price rose by 10* (similar to doge) for example, we would have 400 sponsoring sancs. Maybe the XMR 10% portion is hampering our growth
Hmm yeah its intresting perspective. And i suppose even if the 10% tithe would be removed, the donation adress still could exist.
Yeah i recon the userbase would go up quiet abit with fully merge-mining.
Looking at blockchains like decred, sia coin , etc etc that was "merge-mining" compatible in claymores eth mining program. those coins saw some huge userbase increase...
I guess we need to step back for a second and ask, if we standardize our codebase a little more and allow pure-merge-mining with no-orphan charity from the pools, and just put it out there, would we be mined by a magnitude more, or would that hurt us?
Indeed, i dont think merge-mining is a bad idea, but more how can we get the maximum response out of it. More users and more trading, potentially more sponsorships for diffrent projects are all positive in my book.
Stay safe guys and speak to you laters.
PS: Looking forward testing out new UTXO staking on mainnet!