Me as member of Firo community stays with Firo because trust in development team, without it project will be dead. There is many things (deterministic nodes, Lelantus, Chainlocks, mobile wallet, upcoming Elysium and Spark). I wonder which other privacy coin made so much improvements and research as Firo did.
To destroy dev team would be stupid decision. I personally think it should be more.
As I’ve already said, I’m happy with the team’s work (which doesn’t prevent me from having a critical eye and not sharing choices made in the past, but that’s the democratic game to accept what the majority decides).
A team is essential today for Firo, I do not question it. And a 15% distribution for the team and 5% to test the community fund seems to me a good first compromise. If one day the community fund relieves the work of the team, it would indeed be logical to pass to 10% the team and 10% the community fund.
I try to share my opinion on the best support for Firo through the distribution of the block-reward. I am not a fanatic of masternodes or PoS: I was even against ZCoin accepting masternodes. But now they are here and, from my point of view, as Firo is designed today, it is by allocating to them at least 60% of the block-reward that we have a chance to raise the price of Firo again and to be able to fund this project.
At the end of the day, we created this coin for the community and there’s a reason why a huge percentage of supply is community owned rather than having a premine for ourselves.
If people don’t believe what we are doing is right and that the core team is to blame for the lack of price appreciation, that’s fair too and we can shoulder the responsibility for it and hand the Dev rewards back to the community completely in September which is when we were supposed to have a community check in on the Dev reward anyway.
My original plan was to eliminate the development portion after four years. I expected that the community should be strong enough compared with Bitcoin; the result does not indicate we are reaching that point. Personally, I think that if the project is big enough in terms of a community like Bitcoin or Bore Ape, it can remove development and research portions as many will have a stake in the project and have the incentive to cultivate the project forward without the core development team. Still, in current situations, Firo isn’t reaching that level, and my proposal is another way to expedite Firo achieve the decentralized goals as soon as possible.
Just to mention from your replied, the development team should focus on development for the rest of the project especially on technical side. In digital or PR side, we have done our best to perform necessarily functions. Still, the project should not rely on our solution suggestions, they should have options to select like various marketing agencies.
I agree and it actually reminds me of the beginnings of the project.
It is clear that the project still needs the team: the community is not strong enough to take over. Normally, we shouldn’t fund this community: everyone should have their own interest in it. The problem is that with a Firo price that drops every year, no one finds it interesting and therefore there is no community. You will be able to put 40% of the reward block to the community, if the price continues to fall, it will not be more than 5% at the current price. And the price received to decrease… until you put 100% of the reward block and have a price of 10 satoshis. The critical issue is to Firo’s price decline.
What supports the financing of the Firo project (whether through the development fund or through a community fund) is the price of Firo and this price is falling, so the financing of the project is increasingly problematic. The priority is therefore to stop this decline. To do this, I looked at the buyers concerned and the sellers concerned. Only masternode owners are structurally long-term buyers, so the reward block must be massively directed towards them.
Well - it’s good to see a nice exchange of ideas, and seeing both Reuben and Pormin both weighing in.
I apologize ahead of time for the following rant …
First off - I think Firo has gotten to where it is (developers of the best crypto privacy protocols in the crypto space) because of the dev fund - and it shouldn’t be removed until there is alternative funding.
As for the issue of tokenomics - we have to remember - any changes to tokenomics may only have a small effect on the price of Firo - and it may not impact the price at all. It’s also possible that with too much change it could backfire and drive some of the community and supporters away if they don’t agree with the changes.
Personally - I prefer Reuben’s approach as it will ease into a change - so we can determine the impact, if any, and reevaluate if more changes are required in six months or a year.
To me - changing tokenomics can be used to reward Master Nodes for their increased responsibility in the network, and continue rewarding Miners with less rewards since they continue to perform an important albeit less critical responsibility in the network.
I think setting up a Community Fund is also a great idea - and it can be used for things that will increase Firo’s desirability in ways we have not even thought of yet.
The key thing that needs to be figured out - and very soon - is - what have other coins (the ones that have a descent price) done right, in order to get them to where they are now - and I don’t mean the ones that have VCs or did ICOs - but - are there any coins that have really gotten to where they are with true community grass-roots energy - and what did they do to get there (I actually can’t think of any off the top-of-my-head as I type this - but there must be some - and if not - we need to come up with a plan that works for Firo).
What makes people want to buy crypto and hold it and use it? I’m sure that use cases play a big part. We need to get away from the pump-and-dump and day trader scalpers and into a true ‘grass-roots’ usage scenario to make Firo survive. Don’t get me wrong - having the best tech around is important - but what we are missing is the grass-roots usage cases. Also - again - don’t get me wrong - I know the team has been really trying to increase the use cases (Travala etc.) but we seem to be missing something unique or special to make Firo stand apart from all the others (maybe something built on top of Elysium may be the key to success). Continuing to move the technology forward is still very important - but isn’t the solution to the price issue.
The Community Fund could have a very big role in the turn-around of Firo. The price of Firo will only go up for a few reasons:
1 - A whale or whales see something in Firo that the little fish don’t see, and they buy Firo and support it’s price.
2 - Firo finds a unique use case that everyone wants to be part of (I hate to use the examples - but - Defi, NFTs, etc - but not those).
3 - Privacy may be the ultimate use case - especially in the world the way it’s evolving right now - another reason to continue to roll out the tech.
4 - The use of something that will expose Firo to more people is required - and as many people have said - advertising is a waste of money - so it has to be something more grass-roots - and if there is a push - it should be after the tech is rolled out - before that people will just figure Firo is just ‘selling vaporware’.
We don’t know if changing tokenomics will help or not - but we won’t know unless we try. We shouldn’t wait too long to make a change - and in my opinion - it shouldn’t be too extreme.
Your post summarizes very well several important points: I did not see any rant personally.
This topic is about block-reward distribution, that’s why we focus a lot on it :-). But I agree, it’s the uses of Firo that give it its true value: relying on the reward block for it is subterfuge. I had hoped for a time that it would be adopted for PlayBoy when they had decided to separate from Paypal (from memory): Reuben had tried but that did not work. Nothing is easy 
.
I tried to assess the possible influence of block-reward on Firo price. For this, I based myself on the volumes of exchanges, but it is far from satisfactory. According to recent figures from CoinMarketCap, there would be around 450,000 Firo traded every day and the reward block is only 3,600 Firo per day. These figures would suggest that the block-reward influence would actually have little effect on Firo’s price.
But we must go further and try to find out what the 450,000 Firo trading volume corresponds to.
I therefore hope that the 3,600 daily Firo of the block-reward are likely to influence its price. It is because it is important to attribute at least 60% of this block-reward (2,160 Firo) to those who hold their Firo: principaly the masternodes.
One of the questions that I don’t see being directly addressed is: in a more perfect world where miners were behaving more in line with what the project needs from them, what is the value of mining to the project? That answer would determine what the miner proportion should be rather than being upset with miners lack of loyalty and slashing rewards on that basis. Maybe it actually is just 10% but if so, that’s being lost on me as there is a fair amount of at least frustration in some of the posts coming through. The observation that miners are mercenary seems accurate and fair for the majority of miners. Stakers are just as mercenary… they merely operate over a longer time horizon as they are dealing primarily with sunk costs rather than ongoing capex and opex that miners must continuously re-evaluate. However, that doesn’t excuse the need for miners to be part of a symbiotic relationship, rather than a parasitic one. Once you’ve determined what their value to the project is, it seems like incentives and disincentives would be the way to go to get the relationship on track with what the project needs.
For example, it sounds like mining pool diversity is a/the major short term issue. Has there been any discussion with the mining pool in question re: what the project would like to see in terms of hash rate from a single entity? The mining pool could trivially start driving some portion of miners to other pools in the short term with a sharp increase in pool fees. One might ask ‘that seems contrary to their interests… why would they do such a thing?’ Well, if the project decides to slash miner payouts or eventually go PoW entirely, which could be communicated as a worst case scenario, their lions’ share of the Firo mining hashrate would become entirely worthless. Smaller slice of a larger pie and all that.
Coming at it from another angle, other pools can lower their fees to attract miners (the current difference of 1.0% vs 0.9% isn’t enough… it needs to be more like 0.5% or less at least in the very short term) and then raise them as the hash rate is more evenly distributed. Another possibility could be a project funded pool (with an explicitly stated maximum hash percentage that it would actively work to keep below both via scaling pool fees. This would signal to the other pools that you’re not trying to drive them out, just ensure a more healthy hashrate split between ppols) which reinvests it’s profits to try to implement and drive adoption of some of the features Reuben was discussing in the interview.
Regarding some of the other issues Reuben raised in his interview: I don’t think you can lump miners into a monolithic entity as there are multiple aspects to the mining community. The mining pools and mining software developers, while probably also mining themselves, are primarily infrastructure providers to the rest of the mining community. I’d expect that their natural tendency is to provide a lowest common denominator solution to miners as most mining software supports multiple coins and most larger pool operators likewise operate pools for multiple coins. They are the people who need to enable taking advantage of some of the features Reuben was discussing in his recent interview. Even miners themselves aren’t monolithic: you have everything from individual miners with a single GPU to industrial scale miners operating mini-datacenters. While the more vocal and longer term miners tend to care more deeply about the original ideas behind crypto and pay attention to individual projects, the majority tend to look at profitability rankings and follow the money. That’s the reason I started from the standpoint of incentives and disincentives: rather than appealing to their goodwill, appeal to their bottom line and they’ll listen.
It`s interesting how my own opinion is changing while following this thread from the beginning.
Just a few thoughts:
Would it be possible to pay out the Matching Fund to a Multi-Sig Adress controlled by a community committee like Poramin suggested? like a 4/5 Multi-Sig for example. This would be some sort of control mechanism. But if we reelect the committee after a period of time, how to pass on the keys to the next members 
?
I wouldn`t burn the funds that were not needed. Just accumulate it over time. Mby we need a big funding like a code audit in the future where a lot of members will contribute. No need to destroy it imho. Would also makes the “max supply question” more complicated.
When we start out with 5% Matching Fund and it works out well, couldnt we just raise it over time and fund the Devs and Reseach with this Fund? This way the community could decide the direction of the project. Reuben mentioned that Spark isnt out yet for a reason. If all topics the Dev Team is working on can be funded, i would love to contribute to this to make it happen sooner than later. Especially when i know my Tip is matched by the fund. The downside is, the Dev Team wouldnt have a guaranteed salary anymore, but im sure they would got paid by the fund even more than they are getting now.
I’ve spoken to 2miners to raise their fees but they weren’t keen. Others had dropped their fees a bit but miners didn’t bite. It can’t go much less than 1 percent to be profitable anyway.
Remember Devs and researchers want job security so living from donation to donation will be challenging. Just take a look at how far our Magic Fund donation for Spark code audit has gone.
Multisig or committee isn’t an issue. That’s what it was supposed to do anyway.
Ah, now I’m understanding better where your frustration is coming from. Yeah, if the dominant pool won’t cooperate that’s not good.
Something that might help a little bit is to put a blurb on How to Mine Firo (FIRO) with FiroPoW | Firo - Financial Privacy Renewed requesting that people not send additional hash rate to the 2miners for the time being until their share of the mining power is reduced. When I’m starting to work with a new coin, I generally look for the project’s mining page to see if there are any pools they recommend which is a good opportunity to explain the situation before someone puts their rig on autopilot.
Oh yeah, totally.
This was thought way in the future. The ultimate goal would be to go the Satoshi way. Sure, most of our Devs can`t go anonymous anymore, but mby (if FIRO climbs in the hundreds again and we are all rich 
) they can offer their talent to the community and we are more than willing to pay them in an appropriate way 
I’ve been reading this forum and t looks like you are avoiding the obvious solution.
What are the issues?
Miners dump as soon as they can driving the price lower and endangering the project.
Miners concentrate majority of hash power on one mining pool endangering the project.
The mining pool refuses to cooperate.
Miners refuse to participate in community.
The obvious solution is to eliminate the miners and go full POS.
Thats bad for tree reasons:
The miners are not providing security. They are destroying the project.
They are being paid and they stick a knife in the back of Firo, repeatedly.
If miners and/or stakers are providing too much buy/sell pressure, I’d argue that that’s an issue with market supply/demand as those of us providing the infrastructure should be rounding error in the mix regardless of whether we buy, sell or hold the coin long term. We’ve had a variety of things going on currently and the not too distant past in the world where a privacy coin seems like it should be part of the solution. So another (separate) issue for the project to try to address is the supply/demand issue of ‘normal’ users of the coin via use cases. If you’re thinking ‘get rid of the miners and reward those who HODL’ is the issue to be resolved, I think you’ll be disappointed with the outcome.
So the person you are paying to provide security knowingly and deliberately undermines the very security you are paying him to provide. Not only that, but he knowingly and deliberately takes actions that will destroy you financially. All after great efforts were made to help him in addition to his payments.That is a stab in the back.
Do you pay him a little less, or get rid of the problem entirely? I say get rid of him. Sure, entirely new problems may arise by a drastic change. But, the situation as is is untenable.
Firo is the best thing out there. But it is in a death spiral. Drastic changes are in order.
I like this suggestion. I think that a way to reward mining ‘hodlers’ is to give them access to MN rewards, this can be done already but they need a pretty serious rig (more like a farm) to obtain 1000 coins in the first place. I think that a possible ‘layer 2’ solution would be if the FIRO code could be developed in some way that would allow the tokenisation of masternodes. Or some trustless way that hodlers with bags <1000 coin could group together to form groups big enough to secure the network with a masternode. If there was an incentive for people to run empty masternodes, that would become productive when they gathered enough stakers, could that work? Its just a rehash of a mining pool on ADA or baker on Tezos but staking has been proven to be popular on those chains. I remember a few years ago there was a group who offered to fractionlise Zcoin masternodes but you had to hand over the private keys, not a very good idea, I can’t remember how it all ended . . .