The "payed by the network" terminology is fine for explaining the effects of coin distribution to newbies, but it's confusing elsewhere.
Anyone starting to learn about "elsewhere" is going to use a higher-detail abstraction anyways. What this comes down to is, when introducing someone to paper money
for the first time, do you tell them that
printing presses create dollar bills, or that trusted organisations do by
employing printing presses? You can explain the details of the relationship later.
All I'm suggesting here is that we:
- Change our terminology for directly explaining BitCoin to newcomers at the simplest level
- Change the mining forum sub-title to something technically accurate like "Block-chain generation"
- Change the client menu option to something technically accurate and simple like "Participate in network processing"
Personally, I'm getting
really tired of having to explain to 80% of all people who hear about BitCoin that bitcoins aren't "worthless because anyone can create as much of them as they want." The whole mining thing is far and away the #1 source of confusion slowing adoption.