Bitcoin Forum

The community appears to have moved towards screaming scam every time they see the potential for a coin developer to make some money on a coin they created, released, and supported.

So as a community, what method of remuneration would you be happy with?

None

~CfA~

Maybe a system that doesn't reward dumping straight away. Some sort of thing like stock options, if possible.

Something that incentivises the devs to actually develop after the launch.

Its more there arent many actual developers in these coins  :o

0.125% hard coded to address that can be redeemed immediately

0.125% hard coded to address that can't be redeemed for at least 6 months after genesis block.

Anyone who says coin devs should not be vested in their coin seem to have no concept on how.... well.... anything works ;) 

Devs having a pump and dump mentality are a HUGE part of the problem. If they have an incentive to stick around, maybe they will.

donations only.

I was thinking along these lines too.. this seems reasonable, a small block reward that goes to a development pool. The addition of half locked seems good too.

Thank you for your input.


I'd love to agree, but in practise this doesn't work - check the donation address on some of your favourite bitcoin software, almost every one I've ever checked has been 0.

It is surprising how many addresses I've checked and seen either zero or a few cents USD as the amount received.

That's why multibit started skimming transaction fees, haha.

Actually, there's an idea. Transaction fees or part of them anyway, going to the devs. Then if people actually are using the coin they get some money.

Another good idea.

Perhaps if it started as 50% of transaction fees, then halved each time the block halved such that miners gradually transitioned over to fees, and the developers away from fees.

The combination of that and the aforementioned % per block could work wonderfully together.

block tax 1% of every block. If they stop working on the coin it's forked and that tax is cut off or pushed to an address of a new developer that takes over and works on the coin.

premines and instamines need to be stopped at once.

As somebody who's about to implement all of the ideas from these threads I feel an idiot saying it, but 1% is too high. 0.25% (0.125% + 0.125% locked) as mentioned before is plenty.

Well with a block tax, you really wouldn't need to lock half of it, since it's not a lump sum payment.  But yeah a block tax of 0.5% or less would totally work as well. 

But personally I think the best idea so far has been the Transaction fee tax.  It is a very small payment, and the dev only gets paid if the coin goes big and is being used.  If the dev can really push the coin, they could make a fortune (More than they are now with a big premine), but without alot of work, or if they leave early and let the coin die, they basically make nothing.

I know that would get me pounding the pavement trying to get vendors/exchanges to accept your coin. 

0.125% of block reward and a halving transaction tax would do it.

Thanks for your input guys, although please do share more if you have it.

Please also comment on my other open thread if you can https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=656240.msg7380974#msg7380974

Plenty of pool sites charge a 1% fee to mine through their site/stratum.  Perhaps 1% is too high for a developer but I do like the idea of a block tax because it incentivizes continued development and support.  If a developer initiated a block tax of 1% from onset we may see less pools jumping onboard until the difficulty rose to a point that solo mining was highly inefficient (which of course depends on the algo/miner hash rate/network hash rate/exchange rate). 

With lashings.  ;D

Cross post ..

This cannot be done. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=660544.msg7757958#msg7757958)

We are back to the original question.

So devs shouldn't receive anything for their time, effort and innovation....?

You must be a miner.

~PB~

Any proposals as to how it can be done? We thought we had a reasonable approach, but we have had to abandon it (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=660544.msg7757958#msg7757958)

i guess people will never be happy and always complain about something and scream SCAM, and they look at seriously developing coins like for example Credits CRD see https://vimeo.com/100148381 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=634403.0 ]

and completely ignore it, the coin is launched and kept alive non stop and worked on and developed on very hard as much as i see the dev. is a decent guy and keeps telling people not to complain later once the new wallet version 2.0 is released, but what will happen? probably after he released version 2.0/ and the people who are now mining at the low diff right now, and believe in the coin and are confident in it, they will be happy and profit, but the same people who ignore it right now, will scream even then SCAM! and instamine and shit like that.

fact is they will always have something to bitch about, because it is a bunch of losers. and its the same people probably who invested in all those scam IPO's which is by all logical means very risky, and this guy brings a product and is ignored


fuckin people just dumb

Are you saying in the linked post that you abandoned the idea because it hasn't yet been done? 

No, it has been done before, and there are multiple ways to technically implement the concept including existing methods such as freicoin.

The problem is that any potential method of implementation reduces down to requiring a change to the block chain that would break compatibility with existing crypto currency software, at the very least mining and pool software would be affected, worst case far more.

Breaking compatibility is too much of a price to pay, so we are forced to abandon the taxation based development fund model.

A new proposal, we'll call it a reverse IPO for now https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=660544.msg7764943#msg7764943

I haven't tested it out, but it seems that you could use lock_time to accomplish my proposal on the previous page. No?

See this thread for discussion (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=131443.0), but, no.

The problem we found was that any taxation requires some transaction to be present (standard or non standard) in a block, any time you add a constraint like that any extending software (like mining software) needs to be modified to adhere to the constraint you added. This breaks compatibility, some coins may be happy with that, but it contradicts what we hope to achieve with Bitmark.

I have thought about that many times.

Did you see the other proposal? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=684526.0)

They don't deserve to be enumerated.
their bills are not my problem.. fuck em !

wanna make dumb ass excuses ? how did free services like Facebook or Google get off the ground ?

We call them scams because they are.. don't play games about it.

Proposal ?
Get a fucking job lazy greedy deceitful pricks.

I always love your replies until they are in my threads, but then you make it better with a typo.

i would take a bad speller any day over a snotty brat Grammar Nazi trolling (Off-Topic) on someone with insults.

most of you do not posses the ability to stay on topic and you are compelled to insult people
yet while doing that you have the bloody audacity to criticize a guys spelling ? For Real ? LOL

gimme a break  ::)

Interesting thread, thanks. 

If I came across wrong sorry, that wasn't my intention.

You made a perfectly valid argument, and one I agree with, any valuation of a project or currency should be earned not presupposed or inflated.

That's principal one of my own project.

Thanks for your input Spoetnik, it was appreciated.

+1 For lulz.

FB and Goog got of the grownd threw ventura Capital.

Hmm..
How about ad-displaying wallets then?

As in - Can't receive any coins until having clicked them...

So do people who disagree with developers being compensated for their time also think that Gavin et al should stop being paid to work on Bitcoin?

So you think Mark Zuckerberg got facebook to where it is now out of his own pocket? That neither facebook or google had investors or what would be considered an IPO in altcoin terms?

I personally think coinbase donations are the way to go. Dev's still get compensated for their effort but the risk of a premine dump is largely reduced.

Perhaps we should make a new crypto generated through 'proof of coin' (PoC) whenever a new crypto gets listed on an exchange, lol.

More seriously, the block tax seems like the most sensible option I've heard.

Wasnt facebook started by students at harvard and didnt they have $20k? I mean.. thats not much but it isnt "nothing" by any means.

And this

a dev has to mine his coin from the first day till the last day. He must be the first to start and the last to stop mining. So if he creates a wothwhile coin he will earn money from it. Other than that: donations and income from creating services for the coin.

Main income for the dev will be the priceappreciation of the coins he holds until they mature.
We are talking about multimilliondollar coinmarketcaps. If you can create a coin that is traded for multimilliondollars later you will be suited. If you can't do that you shouldn't get a large income. Show results first. People get payed after they worked not beforehand.

Your problem seems to be that you want to make a quick buck but can't produce a coin that can compete in the market.

Thank you for not reading anything.

either you doing it because you love it or you are doing it because you have a groundbreaking idea that is a gamechanger. If none of that applies you shouldn't release a coin.

sorry for being direct. Investor here. (one of the last survivors probably)

I would think that a coin developer who believes that his coin will succeed would probably already own significant amounts of the coin that he is developing. Just like the case with Satoshi and Bitcoin. By simply contributing to his own project and helping to push the coin forward, he would be enriching the value of his own coins.

exactly that

that guy asks maybe for constant payout to dump on the market. I'll take that back when prooven wrong of course. No offence.

then we are agreed, that is exactly what I am doing :) here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=660544.220)

watching. Having it on exchange though helps investors to obtain it if they want. If you can't exchange it and speculate on future success what sense does it make?

edit: it's the art to find a balance between reward for miners and protecting interests of investors. Supply and demand makes the price. Keeping it off exchange initially can make sense but later it should get on exchange when you want to open it for investing.

further edit: it'll be about keeping miners interested for the long term to mine it. That's the first thing towards a successful coin.

So do you think it's a benefit to Bitcoin that Gavin et al get paid? Or do you think that they should be doing it for free?

Remember, developers are a limited resource. With completing incentives(ie they can get paid for other work quite easily). As someone who owns a currency and wishes to to see it succeed(which almost always with one exception involves significant development over time), wouldn't you like to provide the maximum amount of economic incentive to the developers of any coin that you hold? It seems to me that it's a case where interests align, but it seems some people don't see it that way.

I can understand people not wanting all the developers remuneration to be front-loaded like it would be in an IPO. It makes sense that you might want something that incentivises continued development and progress.

Ideally, donations alone would be more than enough since like I said, holders and developers interests are aligned. But there is risk that donations fall short. As is often seen in the Bitcoin world. Which is why maybe a voluntary automatic system that takes a fixed amount out of (something) over time is good. But it's still hard to come up with a good system.

Say you had a coin with a 300 million dollar market cap and you owned a large chunk of your net worth in that coin. Would you not want there to be a team of developers working full time on that project? As there is in Bitcoin?

i personally think Gavin is a multimillionaire who owns a lot of BTC from early investing and mining and has more highclass joboffers than he can count. Every day more.  Gavin is suited. Developing a successful coin means also to build a reputation which itself is worth a lot of money.

You make a good point.

We have tried to counter this in two ways.
1. people may invest if they like, any "investment" will be spent on mining rigs to support the network at say 35% of the hashing speed, the btm minted will be split 5% to the foundation and 95% to the investor*
2. we aren't explicitly keeping bitmark off exchanges, we just aren't actively pushing for it to be on exchanges. If an exchange wants to add it at some point that is fine.

* I prefer the term donor, this methods keeps it fair, ensures the network is healthy, and doesn't preassign any would be value to bitmark other than base hashing power cost. Overall network speed and health entirely determines how many bitmarks are returned for any donation. Bitmark distribution is then fairly distributed between those with cash and those with mining rigs. No markets/ipo/premine/price-specification needed.

i think that is a good approach. worked for pesetacoin. probably the best approach you can make tbh.

thank you for the feedback, it is good to know somebody else thinks this is a good approach.

when it comes to built in regular payout for the devs i would say such a thing would make it less attractive since the dev would be expected to sell those coins which puts downward-pressure on the price. If you need that you should keep it to a minimum. Attracting money from outside via investors and have the coin apprechiate in value is probably the better way to raise money.

Better to have a scarce coin with low sellpressure (from devs and miners) which is interesting for investors exactly because of that and have the coin apprechiate in value than having that constant payout maybe?
The higher you pay yourself the less attractive it is for the serious investor. Ideally you don't have any of those payouts and only mine your coins like everybody else and don't sell them but hold them while you continue to increase appeal of the coin and try to cover your livingexpenses otherwise.

To put it short: the more sellpressure you put on the coin for covering your own costs the the less attractive it will be for investors. The investor is where the money comes in.
The perfect coin would have a dev that covers his livingexpenses otherwise and not plain selling his coin. You can earn money from trading (buy low sell high) aswell.
You can implement a stabilizationfund which can produce overhead for example.
Reduce sellpressure as far as possible to get a better price. (supply) while raising demand in one of the many possible ways and you'll have a winner-coin.

I see the problem here. It's the balance miners, devs, investors. Each is important in their own way and can't be left out. There is potentially a lot of math to do (what is electricitycost, how much money do you need to come in to sustain a price x to keep the network running, etc)
Finetuning

maybe pos/pow hybrid is a little cheaper to run? I don't know. Needs to be secure too. (very small pos-reward if pos). Scarcity is important. Scarce coin + high demand makes good price in theory if both demand and low supply are sustainable in time.  

edit: scarce doesn't mean low number of coins, it means low sellpressure/ low inflation - number of total coins doesn't matter.

Hope i was of any help ;)

You have described the problem perfectly.

Long term funding should cover itself, the rationale is simple, if the foundation holds a small percentage of total currency, and that currency has a high value, then expenses are covered and downward pressure is not created when a small portion is sold. This is why the bitmark foundation won't touch any funds until at least 1 year in to the project, longer if possible.

There are multiple things which need balanced as you mention.

I think the problem reduces to developer living expenses. If everything is balanced fairly then I can only see two possibilities:

1. The developer(s) prepare and fund themselves for a period of development time
2. An investor takes a gamble on the developer(s)

Or a mix of both.

A variation is for an investor to acquire an amount of the currency being developed, and then sponsor the development team.

As you say, the main problems are ensuring development incentive and commitment, combined with limiting or alleviating downward pressure.

yes, people are not so generous with donations, i know that.
If devs would announce to not sell large amounts or be very transparent about it that would help. Never sell more than 0.025% of total supply in a week. Possibly even less.

Unobtanium would be maybe a coin to look at since that one struck a fairly good balance in my opinion. They had some minor problems lately including lots of stolen coins being dumped. Without those problems price should be probably a lot higher. We'll see how that plays out, but the parameters could be something to look at and maybe stretch that a bit in time since it was going pretty fast. Dev was mining from the start and still is. Takes donations. Works out fine so far. Will be interesting to watch. No premine or instamine. Fair but relatively rapid distribution. Very nice coin that struck a very healthy balance. Ideally miners are also not dumping because they believe in the coin (like it is with btc, ltc or Uno)
You want to get rid of the miners that dump straight away. You want to attract miners that believe in the coin and hold it.

If developers can fund themselves through other channels than selling at least for a year that would make a good picture for the coin given there is no premine or regular payout. If you then can create demand, have miners that hold and are holding yourself the coin surely goes to the roof.

needs to be fair, rare, well distributed and something that either fills existing demand or can create that demand - all for the long term. People need to believe in the longterm success of the coin to hold it.
Distribution is also quite important since the wider it is distributed the less power over the price a single individual has. Coins that are concentrated in fewer hands tend to have more problems than coins that are wider distributed.

enough coinwisdom now. That's something to chew ;)

edit: maybe make a second disconnected coin to capitalize on and leave your main project pure to help it succeed.

Your first suggestion sounds reasonable, I will propose this as a rule for Bitmark.

I will take a look at Unobtanium.

Attracting the "right" miners until the coin has a strong hashrate is very important, it is my main concern. We will see what happens.

Funding through other channels is ideal, but it also can detract from the project development as you said earlier.

Distributed risk seems to work to some extent. For example I needed to raise 0.6 BTC to get resources for bitmark. A few donations of 0.1 average came in, no single donor spent more than they could reasonably afford to lose, and they did not need to take a big risk of trust and belief. Some IPOs seem to work the same, with many buying a small amount.

Speaking for myself, we never know what will happen in life. So it is possible that at some time I will require money to live due to something unexpected. At such a time the issue would be whether to put it to the community transparently, or whether to commit to taking a break to work on something funded. The problem with taking a break is that it can lose momentum and create negativity, forcing prices down, and making it harder to return or pick back up. The problem with the community reliance is just that, there are very few people who are happy to donate cash on the hope that it will increase or maintain the value of an asset they hold (the currency in this case. It is ideal to have emergency funds or reserve for an event like this, but after working unfunded on something for a long time most people would not have an emergency fund left.

I can see you have put a lot of thought in to this, thank you.

edit:

I will think on this more. I considered it and have forked the project to create "Pfennig" a clone-able version, but I felt that creating a coin with no intention of creating long term value or support felt ethically wrong, it would be unfair to those buying the disconnected coin.

I can't comment on Gavin's financial status from jobs before his full time status as lead developer. But he's said that he doesn't own a very large amount of bitcoin. Almost all of his early bitcoin from when mining was easy had been sold off long ago from what he has said.

He felt that it was important for him and his family that he was able to earn a steady income from Bitcoin development which was the main reason the foundation was created.

For those following this thread, we have discovered an additional benefit to the IPM proposal (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=660544.msg7791712#msg7791712).


I also feel the same about the Bitmark foundation, both for myself and others who join the project.

What do you guys think of this idea

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=700125

I think it's wonderfully simple and AFAICS would work well.

The two "fair" block chain approaches are:
1. Block or Transaction Fee Taxation
2. What you suggest, a premine which is locked.

The problem with 1 is that it breaks backwards compatibility with existing infrastructures such as mining pool servers and more. If BC isn't a problem then you can use this.
The problem with 2 is that nLocktime doesn't particularly work, it would require the transactions to release the premine to be floated around the network until each lock time is hit, which would be transaction spam/ddos and if the network was busy they wouldn't be held in the transaction pool.

After studying all the technical approaches, we came to the following conclusion for Bitmark, to use Investor Public Mining (IPM) Pool, coupled with a donation based foundation (https://github.com/project-bitmark/bitmark/wiki/IPM-Pool)

I am currently testing the process and it seems to work well, it also has a wide range of benefits for miners, investors, network health, attack mitigation, and continued incentivised developer support.

I was referring to this scenario


Premine distributed over group of addresses that
are hardcoded so that their balances cannot be spent
until predetermined block height.

If you can't foot the bill for your own coin you should not be expecting payment for it later
or taking it by force with a pre-mine (then cashing it out later when guys get bored and wander off and no one is looking)

you idiots in the scene support crypto-welfare.. they have their hand out smug with attitude like we owe them !
fuck em..

if i wanted to have a kid do i send the bill to you altcoin mouth piece's ? YOU pay for it !

few areas in life is as utterly fucked up and corrupt and outright stupid as crypto.
we're debating things with greedy corrupt scumbags who think Scams and Clones and IPO's and Pre-mine's and Crowd Funding and Angel investing etc.. is all good shit.

Crypto-Excuses™ for retard greedy lazy deceitful fucktard scammers and their greedy idiot supporters who want a slice of the Premined Pie..  ::)

What about good old hard work, with no premine, instamine, ipo, taxation, unfair distribution or anything of the like?

If somebody creates an alternative currency with zero value, and earns some value for it over time by working hard, whilst mining or buying a tiny fractional percentage for themselves, is that fair?

For example is satoshi had kept say 500 BTC for himself out of the millions we have, for a few years of hard work, would you begrudge him that?

Seems that you react without taking time to reflect
what is being proposed.

..but in your case that is perfectly OK.  

i am saying NOTHING should be proposed.

read the topic title..

they are not entitled to anything nor do they deserve anything ..it's open source software after all.
and many of these greedy dipshits should be in jail for charging money for open source code other people wrote and GPL'd.
debating on how i should charge people for open source software is typical idiot fucktard logic.. no big surprise around here  ::)

save the excuses.. they don't work on me

Ideology doesn't pay the bills.

But that is exactly what you do.

So you would never donate to a developer who worked hard on a currency that you like?

Lots of open source developers now contribute to their projects for a living. Because people who use the software see the benefit in enabling full time development which will progress the software.

Where would Linux be now without being able to pay professionals to work full time? Donating to something like the Linux foundation is clearly in the best interest off lots of large corporations which is why we see lots of them donating large amounts of money on a yearly basis.

you should design a business model on paying your bill by using someone else free open source code.. write if you wan to do that maybe.

and you wanna pay bills ? get a job.

cloning an altcoin using other people's free GPL source code does not entitle you to a pay check in one form or another.

and and

snarky little quips or sayings that have no relevance don't win arguments.
what pays bills ? getting a job.

or i guess by finding a way to take money by force from victims and scam supporters on endless digital ponzi schemes.

show me one fucking coin here that a guy deserves to be paid for .

bullshit, i don't release coins and i also don't sit around here trying to find ways to cook up a so called "distribution model" with an integrated paycheck for myself.

I never seen one i felt worth donating too except for Bitcoin.. the rest can go fuck themselves.
and it's one thing to post a donation address and it's quite another to add a premine etc..
donating to the Linux foundation is real and legit and great option.
paying coin cloners is not .

you guys just want to justify your posting ponzi schemes and wanna discuss the best way to get paid for doing it..
cloners already make lots of money by exploiting all kinds of advantages i have seen in dozens of ways in the last year
and you guys are playing dumb about that and ignoring the fact that the dev position has been exploited BAD.. pretty much 100% of the time.
if being able to mine the coin or what ever on MINUTE ONE of the coins release is not enough then your being greedy.
Why do you guys think your entitled to a paycheck over top of your supported paying for electricity or service costs ?

you guys are playing dumb little games, saying how do i get paid ? i am doing the work..
But your only doing the work to get paid in the first place !
IF you were truly interested in doing the work you would do it for free and pay what little costs incurred out of pocket by getting a job.

i know i am a life long coder who has created endless programs online ALL FOR FREE for close to 15 years.. that is a LOT of software u have coded and posted online !
so spare me your weak ass greedy pathetic arguments.
coin cloners don't deserve fuck all !
The perks you get from being the guy posting the coin and having access to it on day one is faaaaaaaaaaaaaaar more than enough payment.. don't be greedy .

If you create something really new and stable that can becomes new Bitcoin some day - ever 1%premine is pretty much. Some about 0.5%for all dev's and promoution team and then just donation's. If the coin is really good - this amount is enough for team. In the opposite case  - they deserve no profit.

Who's the 'you guys' you keep referring to? No one is doing premines or anything like that.

The thread was simply meant as a place to discuss how developers should be remunerated. And if you think donations are the only way they should be remunerated then that's a valid argument to make, but you're not really making any argument. You're just screaming 'ponzi this' and 'scam that'.

You assume that this thread is full of 'scammers' as you put it but if you've been paying attention that's actually not the case at all.

If you think that this altcoin scene is full of bad actors then threads like this where the community can have a rational discussion about important issues are important. Just try to take a deep breath first before making assumptions.

The thing being created is already launched now, Bitmark. We originally planned for a 0.25% taxation on each block, however rejected this and moved to a donation based Bitmark Foundation, where all donations are in the BTM currency only, locked until for a year at least.

My goal was not to create something which earned profit, but to create something which ensured that if Bitmark was widely adopted, the team working on it would have a reasonable amount of the currency to support continued development and further focus on enabling greater adoption.

Like it or not, bitcoin will fail without other coins.
Decentralizations means more than one coin for the market itself to choose from, the market should not be centralized on a single currency.

The limited supply of bitcoin means demand for currency will result in the creation of alternate currency.

Like it or not, bitcoin was the first of its kind and the first always has design issues that could have been done better, because the first of its kind didn't have real world experience to draw upon.

Personally I want the next coin that has major success to be open source, and the best way to see that happen is for there to be a profit motive.

Clearly pre-mine where the developer gets it all at the start is a bad model, too easy to scam.

But a pre-mine where the developer slowly gets access to it over a 3 year period, that's only profitable if the coin is a success - the developer only profits if a lot of early adopters profit and continue to profit.

I don't want Google or PayPal creating the next digital currency that gets broad International adoption. I want it to be open source, and skilled developers need to be paid.

Don't get me wrong here, I do not support premining in general. But consider this: The devs having a premine can give them an incentive to make their coin better. The more successful their coin, the more their premine is worth. Note that in the overwhelming majority of cases this doesn't apply, due to the overwhelming majority of cases being scams.

One problem with this is that while they have incentive to make their coin better, it's only until they sell their premine at which point they have no more incentive to work on the coin.

The whole premine - pump - dump thing has been done to death as everyone knows. New solutions are needed that balance fairness and incentive. So far the IPM is the best idea. Time locked coins are another good one as well.

Donations can work only with a community that is fully behind a coin and has the resources to support it, which is not easy. Some people might have the will to support a project, but not have the funds to match their enthusiasm.

So what about AliceWonder's proposal? I think its strength is
its simplicity. It is understandable to the non-techies, and
because of that great at inspiring confidence towards the dev(s).  

Right, that's what I was referring to when I mentioned "time locked coins". That one could work as well.

A tax per block does the same thing.
A Transaction fee tax has the greatest incentive as the rewards only come when people actively use the coin It forces the development team to do everything they can to encourage adoption.

Yeah, if you think about it that way it is pretty much the same thing.

And it's good that it's distributed slowly over time rather than a lump sum all at once.

One potential issue with a tax per block is that transactions that happen off the block in major web wallets wouldn't be subject to it.

e.g. when Mt. Gox was still around, a lot of transactions simply weren't in the blockchain because they went from one Mt. Gox account to another.

So people who did not use the major web wallets would be subsidizing those who did.

I think in this case the large majority of developer remuneration is coming directly from the newly generated coins from each block as opposed to transactions. That is until the the block rewards reduce themselves over time as is normally the case.

If it is largely coming from the reward then it isn't incentive to make the currency used because block rewards are paid even if there is no activity.

The tax could be base amount * number of transactions in a block.

Well a useful currency will drive demand which will naturally increase the price of the currency if the supply is limited.

It takes a long time for a currency to mature fully in to one driven entirely by transactions. We're not even really close to that with Bitcoin yet. It's a long term thing and it's good to have devs that are in for the long term.

One problem with that is how to prevent someone just spamming transactions. Not that we would expect a dev to do that. But someone could do that and then people might blame it on the devs gaining the reward causing problems.