What I mean is, 200 million USD is a very, very large amount of money. Even for a 4 year period.
It seems a lot, but for a big organisation with many staff, grants, infrastructure etc etc itās not a huge number and I wouldnāt like to speculate.
I would rather try and stick to talking about this proposal and offer ideas people may have here if possible.
I strongly oppose the idea of funding MF or O1 operations from the pocket of the stakers.
I have so much respect for the technical excellence that Mina dev teams have but there is a growing detachment between the ācommunityā and the teams.
I also donāt think itās too late to rescue the situation but it needs a realization that the current way isnāt working and the bravery to try a different approach.
āThe definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different resultsā
Albert Einstein.
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Thanks for the tag, looks like I am kind of late to the conversation here but still want to chime in.
About the general idea of removing stake rewards it just doesnāt make sense to me at any level. We need sustainability, and considering the broader market, Mina has one of the top 10 lowest inflation rates among major chains. Comparing it to something like 3% from Ethereum isnāt a realistic comparison. The demand for staking is non existent because high rewards can attract some demand from traders. But considering Minaās position and its current reward rate, no trader would go for it.
Regarding reducing supply if we reduce it by 10%, itās going to be reduced for everyone. Itās a decentralized network. Thereās no way to reduce the existing supply unless itās coming out of someoneās pocket. If weāre just changing the numbers so that everyone has 10 Mina instead of 100 Mina, thatās just a waste and will have no positive long-term impact. Itās simply trying to trick the market.
The issue here is demand. Fixing the demand issue is hard to quantify as a single factor. There are a lot of variables at play, but from a broad ecosystem perspective, I see two things having the biggest effect, so Iāll just briefly go over them. I also scrolled through the conversation, so Iāll reference a few points from that as well.
In general, things need to be built, and as you mentioned, there needs to be support and momentum. If the ecosystem isnāt active, then even if you build, you canāt sustain it because thereās no money to be earned. Then it becomes difficult to find funding from venture capital, etc., and everything becomes harder as it shrinks.
On the building side, I donāt think thereās much missing in terms of tools or expectations. I help projects with product development, and even though I occasionally come across ideas that could use a tech like Minaās, Iāve never recommended Mina to them. The process of building on Mina, and the burden that comes with it, never reaches an acceptable level from my perspective. Maybe itās there but the information is not there. If I canāt find it/know it being very involved with the projects. How mina can onboard products which requires their tech. As mentioned in conversations above, if you lose people, itās hard to get them back, our market is very competitive. This applies to everything community, developers, etc. The biggest problem is that, at the time, there was nothing like Mina. A lot of people were excited about that. Now there are other solutions that let you achieve many, maybe even all of the same things without the massive burden and overhead that Mina comes with. Thatās a very big challenge on its own.
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Thanks so much for this reply Emre, as someone who has always had a great passion (and realism) for Mina I completely respect your opinion and agree with virtually everything you have said.
Understandably like almost all replies on this thread you have highlighted all the challenges, but I didnāt see any proposals or potential solutions to the current situation 
.
My opinion is that we can either do nothing and watch Mina die, or do something and maybe watch Mina die, but maybe also bring Mina back to peopleās attention.
IMO we have two choices
- Carry on as now
We wait for the core projects being built now to launch and hope they are so amazing they will reignite the trajectory of Mina. This is possible, but I canāt see anything on the horizon that is powerful enough to do that in the short / medium term.
Until then we are potentially faced with lower Mina price, more loss of community, devs finding other projects, less people running nodes / staking providers, low morale, angry investors. Will it be too late?
- We take a risk
When I did the survey 82% were in favour of reducing supply. I am talking about reducing the number of Mina being fired out into the system, not burning any current Mina.
We arenāt trying to trick the market, we are saying to the market we are reducing the supply of Mina ie, reducing the amount of staking rewards (temporarily). We are sending a signal to the community that we want to fix the short term problem until the ecosystem is more developed.
ATM There is a big detachment between Mina holders and the engineers, this is a chance to say āWe listened, we have changed things, now it is up to you to support staking providers and the decentralised network to keep things strongā. I think people would get behind that.
I understand the reluctancy to change something based on a non logical argument, but this is something much bigger than just looking at the figures, it could create a change of mentality.
I am not saying my proposal is exactly right, but I think to do nothing is even more illogical.
Why is building on Mina such a burden, could you elaborate? And what is there being done to improve this? Is it possible to make it easier to build on Mina? Iām not very technical so I wouldnāt know, but Iām interested as to why itās so hard and if there are possible solutions to simplify this.
Hey thanks for getting involved.
Sorry to be difficult but could you create a new topic for this and Iāll be happy to leave my opinionsā¦ I want to keep this thread on the tokenomics question if possible. Many thanks. 
I am not suggesting not doing anything but these are not simple things and need to be a fully planed with all of it steps as all of them being successful in first try is slim to none. The verticals with issues then will get improved etc and this cycle can continue.
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I try to write a brief thing, but:
Architecture is complicated. (Even normal capable developers struggle to onboard to Web3 because of itās different architecture. The Mina is completely different from every single way from any blockchain, while 99% of blockchains even though different, function exactly same at base level, which puts a extra barrier).
Documentations are not clear and well documented.
The O1js is actually ocaml/rust wrapped thing which compiles in to. There is also Wasm for web things which everything runs on. Which is not bad things on their own. There is some stuff you get inconsistent errors and not clear log outputs when you are testing stuff where they come from. For example 1+1+1+1 computations test in splits of 1+1, 1+1+1, 1+1+1+1. O1js constantly get updated, so itās impossible to know, as documentations are also lacking.
Itās not fit for useable applications in general sense; there is a lot of limitations at circuit level. (In theory, you can build bunch of things on your own and make it work, but thatās not any single app developer can take, as it just simply make cost of development 10-20x and, in the end, you still canāt know what you going to have at the end or even itās going to be fit for average user base you are targeting. With this uncertainty, taking this risk just doesnāt make any sense. For base level things and needs for whatever itās going to build should be already built and ready).
There is chainās current slot time and certain other limitations you need to consider designing anything.
When you donāt have anything, itās nearly impossible for any application to generate revenue or make it work in general sense. In ecosystem, everything kind of support each other, because a lot of core components from app experience also lacking. The rest of the apps struggle to stand alone or generate revenue to even reach anything near sustainable. We are more focused on public good and research, but any app who build up requires to generate revenue at some point. When this is lacking, funding also lacks, as most fuds will not take risk on nonexistent market.
Because of everything, even you find the most capable talent and make it work in some way, you still need more resource, more money, more of everything to build on Mina with very low amount of support, funding and possibly to nonexistent or very small market (again, I didnāt even try to get funding for any Mina project, but thatās how it works in general sense).
These are my observations, and I am mostly far away from all of this because thatās how I see it from my years of experience in the sector. I didnāt get involved at any level of direct development till our team worked on zkPassport. Because of my other commitments, I wasnāt that present on zkPassport development, but only the example I give in 3 is from there (which I might be missing some details), but thatās kind of what happened. Rest is how I see it from my experience, but other points I mentioned also get kind of got more supporting data in this development process. Still I did not spend enough hamds-on time on o1js so take everything I wrote with grain of salt.
I believe we are pivoting from deploying/building apps directly on Mina and becoming modular settlement layer, so these details much more irrelevant as time passes.
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