Funding requirements

There are 39 publicly traded miners that I'm aware of. There are hundreds of other businesses. Pools control a huge amount of capital moving around. There should be a sustainable financial model that we should be able to come up with to support Bitcoin Core developers. All these ETF managers should be able to pony up. The pubco's once they are revenue positive should be able to make contributions.

The ETFs right now, the weighted average fees for them is 15 bps. That $60 billion AUM number is going to grow not just from the appreciation of the price of bitcoin but also RIAs and wealth managers and advisors. If you get higher fees, it could be $250m/year by Blackrock and Fidelity revenue. It might be worth for them to be part of this initiative.

How about a BIP for a percentage of transaction fees to be dedicated to something in core developers? Maybe we could achieve something similar on a voluntary basis. Some organizations could pledge to donate some amount of money over some amount of time in a handshake kind of agreement to fund it. Maybe it could be publicized somewhere so other people could see that they are doing it. Maybe that could be a motivation.

On the podcast scene, people donate money to the podcast and we could donate that bitcoin some amount could go to a different organization for developers. This helps people to socially signal that they are supporting that way. Direct transaction fees going to Core development...

The incentives for actually supporting Bitcoin Core are actually not great right now. We talked about some of the downside protections for funding it. But there is no community benefit from doing so. We don't as an industry recognize the ones that do, certainly not enough to make it meaningful. It wouldn't cost us much to advertise and promote those who are support this. Outside of this room, nobody even knows that we are discussing this. We need more work on the awareness front as a community itself.

Manufacturers are very supportive of bitcoin developers. Canaan is in town this week. Bitmain is around. Maybe a marketing initiative to show that you can support the network. Maybe media companies can integrate recognition to highlight folks that are participating through their contributions.

Someone was suggesting a highlight pledge model. What about the sport athelete sponsorship model? What if you go through the conference itself? Or what if developers negotiate with the conferences and only go if their sponsors get highlighted at the conference itself, without paying the conference to sponsor the conferences?

Was one of the ETFs going to fund Bitcoin Core development? I heard it was sunk? What happened? Was there a concern about centralization and how they were going to keep things decentralized. I think the Saylor objection is more like don't mess with my money more than anything else. I think he will come around. I took his comment to be that he is more conservative about changes to the protocol.

What about a federation of groups that are able to highlight the good work of these different charities? They are all independent distinct organizations. As we create the social norms of highlighting and celebrating the social norms that these groups are doing, they get grouped into a federation. Rtaher than one us pointing to a single organization, what if we can point to a confederation of 501c3s or other organizations? That way, we can address some of the collective action free rider problems but we're not establishing a new entity. It's a federation of entities. Have you all considered that?

If there was a way to communicate updates to that structure in some way... maybe a listing of companies in that group? You wouldn't want to get to the point where HRF, OpenSats, Brink becomes the shelling point for development charities and nobody else can now get funding because everyone is funding those three. What if new organizations can join? As long as there's a way bad actors can get tossed out, and new actors can get into the confederation. I think the best way to do something like that is all the organizations-- maybe there's some information about these organizations and some can contribute and look and choose to donate and some of that will naturally work itself out if you let people to do what they want and provide some light guidance on organizations doing similar work. This way, you don't have to worry about formal consortium blessing one organization over others.

There was something called Bitcoin Foundation. This is the reason why we have Bitcoin Cash today and why Craig Wright got so much publicity... he was blessed by the Bitcoin Foundation people. OG bitcoiners will see this in the same way. All the money went to the Bitcoin Foundation, and they were picking and choosing who would get funded. Setting up a p2p way of funding, or bounties, or picking through a list of charities is a much better model and more in line with the thesis of bitcoin.

I think the way OpenSats was setup was interesting. It's another way of doing governance. Applications come in. They get vetted. The board does a majority vote on who gets funded. We use github to organize. It's a private github so you can't see what our comments are. But the board is basically people-- people on the board have to be technical, some of it is traditional VC, but a lot of the board is technically competent. So there's some who are core developers, some who work on lightning/L2, etc. It requires a good amount of technical understanding on the board to understand which projects are worth putting funds into. A portion of the funds goes to Bitcoin Core developers and I think we're going to grow that soon. I'm not super tied into that. We also fund a lot of projects across the space which are more on the hardware side. We also do funding for lightning/L2 projects. We also are starting to fund more in education layer.