One night the manager proposes something. Take ten percent off the top of that pool, every shift, and put it toward fixing the kitchen. The kitchen does need fixing. Everybody in the room agrees on that, so the meeting spends an hour arguing about which repairs come first. The servers go home with less. The cooks go home with the same.
Bitcoin has a version of this conversation, and it comes back every few years.
A little background first. New bitcoin gets created on a fixed schedule and paid to the people running the machines that secure the network. That payment is called the subsidy, and it is the wage that buys security for everybody else, including people who never run a machine. Every so often somebody proposes redirecting a slice of it. Sometimes to fund software development. Sometimes to fund a shared service. The proposal always shows up dressed as a technical change, with a spec and a diagram.
My claim is one sentence. Read the distribution before you read the mechanism.
So ask two questions first. Who receives less under this, and what do they stop doing when they receive less. Then go look at the diagram.
Most people writing these proposals mean well, and I want to be clear about that. The trouble is that a funding argument and an engineering argument feel identical from the inside, and only one of them comes with a number you can check.
The strongest case against me is fair, and I am not going to dodge it. Some work needs paying for and no single participant will pay for it alone. Software development is the obvious example. Calling that a distribution fight and walking away does not make the work get done, and a network that cannot fund its shared work eventually loses the people doing it.
What would change my mind is measurable, and I will name it. A reward redirection that funds development for years, with no measurable drop in what gets spent on security and no operators walking away from the job. If that happens somewhere and it holds, I will say so out loud.
Until then, when the next one arrives, follow the money before you read the spec. The diagram will still be there when you get back.
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