I'd like to discuss the design and viability of a new feature, something that might be called Automatic Price Mooning, or Moon Ratcheting or maybe something catchier.
The idea stems from the question, What will make investors most interested in buying and holding BBP?
I thought of creating a built in trading mechanism that requires BBP to buy coins off the open market each month, (with the intent that if we have an increasing volume and an increasing price, it would provide impetus), but the downside to that idea is that in order to raise capital to pay sancs to buy on the open market we have to sell our own currency which further exacerbates a bigger sell wall on SX (which imho, we need to get rid of at this point, not make it worse).
So the best idea I have at this point is to make an algorithm that Records our current price in Satoshi (down to the 9th digit), so today for example our price is .000000015 at the daily GSC superblock height, once per day. (And, we will remember the last 7 days of prices in memory also).
What we would do is simply have two rules:
If the snapshot price is Less than Yesterdays snapshot price, OR Unchanged from Yesterdays snapshot price, we pay all blocks at 7 BBP for that day. (Meaning that the sanctuaries and the miners get shorted by 99% of their reward that day).
Otoh, if the snapshot price is HIGHER than yesterdays snapshot price, even by .01 satoshi, we emit our normal rewards for that day.
So the marketing on this is IF BBP does not have a continually increasing price in Satoshi, we pay 99% less rewards to the Sanctuaries and to the Miners.
This would give an impetus for someone to step in to SX and buy up at least enough to get us to the next satoshi higher.
I think its a pretty strong impetus to keep the price rising (hence the name Automatic Price Mooning).
Obviously when we hit a high barrier like 7 Satoshi, we would waver for a couple weeks at 7 to break through to 7.1 etc.
Of course the downside is the sanctuaries would get strong cuts along the way, but remember since everything is relative, a higher price per coin * existing supply is still equal to a higher reward than more coins * less price (VALUE = COUNT_OWNED * PRICE).
The main viability of this idea is actually on the question, will more net miners and project participants enter BBP as they see the price rising to real levels - levels where people take this project seriously.
I don't believe this idea will in any way hurt our security, because we are rolling out fully locked LLMQs with chainlocks in testnet (this means the sancs constantly monitor the order of the blocks), so lack of payment with merge-mined blocks should not pose any security risk to the chain. I think the entire effect will be on those who receive rewards wondering why they got 1 bbp instead of 3000 etc.
And lets think of a really bright outcome: What if this wild idea gains national attention? Price Mooning? What if a lot of people jump in and say, BiblePay is breaking through with this strange feature.
On a side note, we would leave the monthly governance emissions the same during the variable emissions phases - simply because we do not want fork risk. The gov emissions are precalculated in many places and shorting those proposals down to 1 bbp causes too many problems. However note that we will have proposal in soon to reduce Governance expenses down dramatically (since governance is no longer paying for charity) and we can give that portion to the coinbase reward so the sancs get more of a reward (and that helps them pay for POOS).
Please, if you have improvement or suggestions or downsides, please let us know. Im willing to change the idea, but obviously it has to be able to work without fork risk.
EDIT:
Btw, BBP would save 1.8MM per day on emissions when implemented (or 45MM per month). So there is a real theoretical impetus for a rising price when less coins are minted that would ultimately be sold.