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PR #66Draft

Use PoX for fuelling Bitcoin development

By Ludo Galabru

  1. Idea
  2. Draft
  3. Accepted
  4. CAB vote
  5. Recommended
  6. Activation
  7. Ratified

Abstract

This document evaluates the consequences of turning the tokens being burnt for minting Stacks into a source of funding for its base chain.

Introduction

The Stacks chain exists thanks to the base chain it anchors its blocks to. The PoX does reward the nodes building this chain, but does not help consolidating the development of this base chain.

The Stacks chain launched in January 2021. Since then, the chain saw a total of 32 PoX cycles. In the PoX design, a theoritical total of 4000 slots can be allocated. When looking at the details of the past cycles, the following can be observed:

Cycle #Reserved slotsVacant slotsBTX committedAmount of BTC burnt
11,3322668149.338
22,15818422812.894
32,99110096315.89175
43,479521617.94525
53,649351383.3345
63,715285574.06125
73,709291594.29225
83,729271483.252
93,497503374.65275
103,664336312.604
113,757243442.673
123,572428464.922
133,551449485.388
143,707293483.516
153,844156501.95
163,864136501.7
173,791209482.508
183,657343494.20175
193,781219553.01125
203,562438566.132
213,870130551.7875
223,686314705.495
233,822178693.0705
243,755245724.41
253,654346716.1415
263,787213603.195
273,701299564.186
283,638362464.163
293,685315554.33125
303,899101541.3635
313,673327463.7605

Assuming that the data from stacking.club is correctly collected, over the last 31 cycles, looking exclusively at "vacant PoX slots", an approximate total of 146 BTC were burnt.

The goal of this SIP and the discussions around it, is to evaluate wether or not turning the process of burning BTC for vacant slots could be turned into crypto donations for fuelling the dvelopment of Bitcoin.

In a more sophisticated version, these funds could be sent to a multisig administrated by a DAO / smart-contract, but in its most naive version, the Bitcoin core development team address could be used (instead of the 0x00 burn address) when Stacks miners are processing vacant PoX slots.