> By funding developers, corporate entities, sovereigns, and bad actors could influence what gets merged in Core.
Sounds like Saylor's message. It presumes that perpetually employed people will looks for things to do and propose changes that aren't needed. But this leaves out the multitude of non consensus work that is done to improve security, efficiency, privacy, etc. If you believe those things are important, you might want the most talented people to do that work. You attract talent by compensating it directly. I know there are veterans who have worked on bitcoin for a long time who have lots of bitcoin, but there are often events that have a chilling effect on developers or they get burned out. So we need fresh talent to build on the shoulders of giants. These folks probably aren't millionaires.
> I suppose what puts a bad taste in my mouth is what I see happening with things like lobbying - corporate entities influencing legislation for their own profit, at the expense of the people
A fair concern that I share. But the UASF gave me confidence that as a node runner, no one can put a gun to my head to run code I don't agree with.
> the larger the blockchain grows in size, the more expensive it becomes to run a node
I believe the argument here is that shifting arbitrary data from witness info (inscriptions) to op_return (removing the data carrier size filter) removes the witness discount, making them pay more but it also has the potential to reduce the size of blocks that have a lot of that data. The largest block contained an inscription ~3.95 mb. The largest block with only op_return data would be 1mb.
> I don’t think that blocks need to be full necessarily in order to secure the network. True, mining becomes more profitable with higher fees, but we should incentivize miners to focus on finding cheap energy, not making less efficient miners profitable.
Eventually the subsidy will be gone and energy can only get so much cheaper. Even energy with negligible operating cost has a large upfront cost which needs to be recouped. I don't see another way to incentivize miners besides transaction fees.
> Spam raises the bid to get transactions in a block and therefore increases fees.
The current spam in mempools is largely <1 sat/vbyte, but I see your point.