I don’t think creon would consider NBT payment at this point.
One thing I don’t agree with him is that Benjamin was the strongest proponent of the 0 reserves model but it takes a lot of care to work. And while we’d be waiting for all those preconditions, playing with BTC was dangerous to begin with and a black swan could have happened in the other direction.
There have been attempts to diversify to other coins. NSR buybacks, NuSafe, the unrealized PPC reserves all operated under the assumption that BTC tends to drop in price. But somehow the price shot up as block reward is close to halving. Nu had not been careful enough in handling money, but blaming it all on buybacks takes a lot of hindsight. The best way to deal with those uncertainties and avoid practical issues with buybacks was perhaps to just put everything into NuSafe, which completely goes against Benjamin’s ideas.
As for profit, demurrage, trading options, loans, alternative fee models and what not, those have all been suggested and discussed before. There were many practical restrictions in that 1. demurrage isn’t viewed very favorably in general 2. there is no outlet to loan NBT 3. Not even NuLagoon or Poloniex want to share transaction fees with us 4. counter-party risk is still real, just to list a few. I’m inclined to think that Nu is either too much ahead of time or not ambitious enough, that it requires a lot of support infrastructure to work well.
But what made things more difficult was that all these somehow attracted less attention compared to setting rule after rule to tie up people who try to make things work. Being a FLOT member, i.e. monitoring walls, checking regulations, arguing about small details about transactions etc. really drained a lot of energy out of me, that at some point I being stopped being able to contemplate and talk about the broader picture of the network. My decision to quit was partly because I could no longer afford the time, facing difficult times in my own personal life.
Probably only moD had the energy to do so many things at once. For this reason I found the “firing” pitch by JL quite offensive - all liquidity providers, as well as active community members, are basically volunteering significant parts of their lives to hold up the network; there’s all to be gained and almost nothing to be lost to just walk away from our responsibilities, and I’ve grown tired of fighting for the network just for peanuts.
