Taxation Reinvented by Bitcoin Miners in Hong Kong?

At the Coingeek Conference in Hong Kong recently a prominent group of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) miners got together to discuss the funding of BCH development. Attendees included Jerry Chan from SBI Bits and Jonald Fyookball of Electron Cash.

Press reports indicate that most of the attendees agreed that it makes sense for miners denote a (small) portion of block rewards, between 1% and 5%, to fund community proposed initiatives. The initiatives could be adopted by a supermajority of miners (75% was discussed) then supported automatically by the mandated percentage from every block found.

This created a moment of what one might call ideological discomfort. Jamie Redman wrote about this informal meeting, and that consensus, in a post at Bitcoin.com. The commenters on Redman’s piece proceeded to debate whether the BCH miners were reinventing taxation. The crypto community harbors a number of anarcho-capitalists and other anti-statists and “taxation” is a dreaded word.