https://bitco.in/forum/threads/buip-pay-out-to-configurable-list-of-addresses-from-mined-block-coinbases.25505/#post-103265

DISCLAIMER, right up front.

This is an improvement proposal which I suggested personally, and it has not yet been accepted by the BU membership, who first need to vote on BUIPs before they get accepted or rejected.

So please do not mistake this for an official BU communication or anything endorsed by BU. I am just a member, every member is free to propose BUIPs (or even sponsor non-members who want to propose BUIPs).

Rough summary:

This BUIP proposes a feature to let a miner easily pay out some percentages of a block reward to additional addresses, which they can freely configure.

The default would be to pay out a small percentage (e.g. 3%) to a donation address set as default by the maintainer of the software (in this case as BU is maintaining the BUcash client, they would receive this contribution).

Benefits:

• entirely voluntary

• public record on the blockchain which miners are contributing to BU development (others may of course still donate as much as they wish out-of-band, i.e. by direct donations or arrange to support a project in any other way they choose).

• allows miners to donate to multiple dev/infrastructure projects if they wish to configure it like that

• miners can already do this (donating out of coinbase), but the point is to make it easy (payout of percentage to multiple outputs is not easily configurable in the major clients)

• no centralized entity that disburses funds and thus holds developer purse strings

Q: How is this better than miners just sending funds to their favorite projects via normal transactions?

A: For one, it is easier to track because it happens directly as outputs from the coinbase, and not some random transactions which someone would need to identify. If miners want more privacy, they can still choose to donate through those.

Secondly, it's automated - once the node is configured, the miner doesn't have to worry about doing manual transactions.

Thirdly, because it's based on percentages of the block reward, it automatically follows reward reductions (halvings) in proportion, unlike manually set up payments which need to have their amounts adjusted manually too (ok, someone could also program to reduce those automatically).

Fourth, why should a miner/pool need to donate 12,5% of their coinbase to spend on e.g. 4 dev teams when they might want to support only the dev team of their choice, which might only get 3% (~ 1/4) of the 12,5% anyway. This proposal might save them the 9% spent on developers they do not want to support. There is a fairness principle here - pay for the service that you use or you want to use. Not pay for services you do not use or want. I think this has been neglected in the conversation so far.