Bitcoin Cash (BCH) proponent Roger Ver says neither he nor Bitcoin.com endorsed the controversial 12.5% BCH miner tax. Meanwhile, Bitcoin ABC is proposing a new dev funding plan which reduces the tax rate to 5% of the block reward.
Roger Ver Distances Himself from Bitcoin Cash Miner Tax
In a YouTube video Roger Ver, Executive Chairman of Bitcoin.com declared that he did not agree to put to his name on the original Bitcoin Cash miner tax proposal from earlier in January 2020.
According to Roger Ver:
I didn’t sign this. There was definitely discussions and I thought the talks were still ongoing when all of sudden this was released with my name at the bottom. I don’t think my name was released with the intention of getting one over on everybody. I think it was just a lack of communication, lots of time zones [and] lots of different languages.
Shortly after the proposal become public, Bitcoin.com issued a statement saying the plan required greater consensus within the BCH community to have any success. As previously reported by Bitcoinist, the blog post stated that Bitcoin.com will not be supporting the plan unless a consensus emerges on the matter.
Bitcoin ABC Proposes 5% Block Reward Tax
Amid the controversy of the BCH miner tax, Bitcoin ABC issued a new infrastructure funding plan (IFP) over the weekend. One of the highlights of the updated plan reduced the block reward tax from 12.5% to 5%.
2/2 This will test if Bitcoin Cash can avoid being captured by a group of developers. Bitcoin does not have payouts to 3rd parties encoded into its protocol. If exchanges and miners download and run the new version of ABC, BCH will be Bcash with no rights to the name “bitcoin.”
— Peter R. Rizun (@PeterRizun) February 15, 2020
According to the Bitcoin ABC blog post, the new IFP proposal also differs from the initial plan in two ways — miners triggering the implementation of the block reward tax via BIP 9 and the possibility of allocating funds to several whitelisted projects at the same time.
Roger Ver raised some concerns with the new IFP saying the 5% miner tax was still arbitrary while raising alarms over the possibility of Bitcoin and Bitcoin SV (BSV) miners abusing the system. For Ver, with Bitcoin miners controlling the bulk of the SHA256 hashing algorithm, rogue actors could use the newly proposed IFP paradigm to damage BCH’s protocol.
Apart from Ver’s concerns, BCH mining nodes that do not accept the miner tax may move their hashing potential over to the Bitcoin chain rather than risk being “orphaned.” Such a move could see Bitcoin mining difficulty experiencing a further upward adjustment.
Attempts to push through the miner tax could also cause another chain split with dissenting voices arguing that the plan creates a dichotomy that heavily favors a cabal of miners and developers who appear able to shape the destiny of the network as they see fit.
Do you think pushing through the IFP will lead to a Bitcoin Cash hard fork? Let us know in the comments below.
Images via Shutterstock, YouTube and Twitter @PeterRizun.
