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.
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...
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!
Yeah it should be interesting to test out UTXO on mainnet.
So good points, Im starting to think of other pros that plain vanilla merge mining might give us. Theoretically if like you said, we gain a lot of users because of the freedom for a miner to go any mining pool and choose 'xmr+bbp', then we could effectively let those pools know how to add us (whereas right now its a rediculously high bar if you look at our pdf, you have to qualify as an engineer and a dba to launch a pool, plus make an honorable covenant and a lifetime pledge for support, and even a financial cost per month is high because of the way the VM is set up).
If we had a plain vanilla merge mine option and we did away with the 10% mining-tithe (and just to clarify very clearly BBP would still be giving to charity through both governance options + sanctuary sponsored orphans so Im not proposing to ditch our charity side at all proposing that the mining side might consider to drop this tithe), thereotically we would probably make up the charitable emission in other areas (as there is no free money or magic bullet anyway) - but let us assume that if our price stays where it is now, with 100 merge miners, first of all our sancs are actually underwater right now -- (the monthly expenses exceed the bbp revenue). If more merge miners (with 0 spend for orphan charity) cause more interest and a higher price, then the sanctuary expenses become positive again (this is because expenses would again be less than revenue when bbp price > 1 satoshi). I can't guess accurately, but I assume if we moved up from 2 microsats to even 2 satoshis, I believe our 50 sancs would then be generating a tiny profit. That exceeds the current ecosystem where we raise $30-$300 per month in orphan revenue from XMR. (Last month we only raised $30 through XMR revenue but sancs paid $1600). As you can see our orphan expenses - the lions share is paid by the sancs anyway.
Im also thinking this might be good for our codebase. We need to stay relatively clean and simple for new users to even understand us. If our pool side gets cleaner, it might be better for us.
