More on ETC's Treasury Idea

Bitcoin is intentionally simple enough that a dedicated team of three to five developers could maintain and secure it indefinitely.

Complexity is the enemy of both security and correctness, since systems like the EVM or sharding grow too large for engineers to hold entirely in their head.

Bitcoin's full nodes each store an exact copy of the chain, making it a replicated system rather than a truly distributed one, and that does not scale.

The Zerocash whitepaper behind Zcash, written by Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Matthew Green, Ian Miers, Eran Tromer, and Madars Virza, was a brilliant but hugely complex 54-page work.

Zcash's team quietly fixed a catastrophic coin counterfeiting bug that could have let an attacker secretly mint fake coins and silently destroy its monetary policy.

Even Zcash's all-star engineers needed years of dedicated, well-funded work to keep the added complexity of the Sapling upgrade secure on top of Bitcoin-like foundations.

Ethereum Classic has to decide, through its treasury conversation, whether to stay simple like Bitcoin or compete with Ethereum on complexity.

Vitalik Buterin told CoinTelegraph that Ethereum's move to Eth2 turned out to be far harder than expected, while Cardano has spent over 100 million dollars in five years chasing that same complexity, with results now showing in the Shelley release.

Eth2's economic moat, built from well-funded ICO companies and an Ethereum Foundation war chest worth hundreds of millions, illustrates the core argument for any treasury: a chain needs a pool of capital, whether from an ICO or generated directly by the blockchain the way Cardano does.

A dApp developer choosing among more than 500 blockchains asks first whether funding is available, and right now there is no clear answer or roadmap for Ethereum Classic.

Ethereum Classic's client teams are mostly doing shallow hard forks that copy Ethereum, work that stops being portable once Eth2 moves to proof of stake.

Ethereum Classic could instead become Bitcoin's test net, borrowing research like BitML, Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees, BLS signatures, coded Merkle trees, Utreexo, and Ergo's ErgoScript.

A Berkeley team's fountain-code compression scheme can encode a 191-gigabyte Bitcoin blockchain down to an average of about 195 megabytes, a roughly thousand-fold storage saving.

A treasury's first core value is funding at least two or three independent, well-funded teams so they can hold each other in check through the ECIP process.

Marketers can target treasury-funded campaigns at exactly the stakeholders who share a project's values on the complexity-versus-simplicity spectrum.

Once independent, well-funded teams exist, developers trust the platform is solid because those teams have a real voice and are not beholden to a rich benefactor.

Ethereum Classic cannot stay where it is: it is too complex to be as simple as Bitcoin, yet its Ethereum-derived technology was only ever meant to be a prototype that gets replaced.

Eth1 is dying and Eth2 reflects painful lessons from DeFi failures, but Ethereum Classic cannot follow Ethereum to proof of stake and still call itself code is law.

Preserving the code is law principle while adding enough complexity to be distinct from Bitcoin, without copying Eth2's pruning, contract rent, and chain edits, is Ethereum Classic's real philosophical challenge.

This simplicity-versus-complexity debate should be held publicly with people free to disagree and funded to build what they believe in, not decided by Hoskinson alone.

Philosophically, a treasury puts the community, not any single leader, in charge of who gets funded and how much, and the system becomes more decentralized and self-improving over time.

Cardano's treasury already holds over 140 million dollars, growing toward potentially billions as the network grows, with more than 50 proposals already submitted to Catalyst's first funding round.

A treasury lets a decentralized community set spending priorities the way a CEO or board would inside a company, something volunteers alone cannot do once a system grows complex.

Linux shows the model: thousands of companies fund its evolution through the Linux Foundation so no single company, like Microsoft, can capture or gut it.

Ethereum Classic has a chance to build its own foundation-style, decentralized funding for tech, adoption, marketing, infrastructure, and partnerships, since right now its volunteers just answer to self-appointed leaders who control the money and the clients.

Systems evolve well when incentives are aligned with greed rather than altruism, the same reason cheap solar power is beating coal on price rather than persuasion.

Two ECIPs are coming Wednesday the 26th: a straw-man treasury proposal for discussion and a ledger checkpointing solution with a demo this week and a Thursday meeting.

The treasury smart contract would only ever be filled with ether through a hard fork, and the design is meant to be portable beyond the Mantis client to Geth as well.