Thanks for engaging, @alexlmiller. Appreciate the commitment to investigate the Endowment-burn alternative for the boost. That’s a meaningful path forward on what several of us flagged.
I want to push on the gas-and-capacity-asset framing because I think it’s incomplete in a way that matters for this proposal.
STX has utility functions, gas, capacity, governance, sure. But PoX also requires STX to be valuable enough that miners spend meaningful BTC competing for blocks. That’s not a marketing claim about STX as a “hard money asset.” It’s a mechanical requirement of the consensus mechanism. Miners bid BTC up to the expected value of STX rewards. If STX value falls, miner bids compress, the reward pool shrinks, yield compresses, consensus security degrades. That dependency isn’t eliminated by reframing STX as a utility token. It’s a structural feature of PoX.
What Bitcoin Staking actually does, on this dimension, is shift which cohort is responsible for supporting STX value. Under PoX-4, STX-only stackers held STX because it generated BTC yield, and their demand supported price. Under Bitcoin Staking, STX-only stackers are demoted to residual claim, and the new value-supporting cohort is BTC stakers buying STX as paired collateral. The role of “value supporter” moves from one cohort to another. The role itself doesn’t go away.
This is why the demand cohort question I raised in my earlier post is load-bearing, and why I don’t think it was addressed in your reply. If BTC participation at scale doesn’t materialize, the new cohort expected to support STX value isn’t there. The mechanism degrades exactly as the reflexivity risk in section 8.1 describes. Dual stacking is the closest empirical test we have, and it didn’t pull capital at 20% collateral. Current price action doesn’t show BTC holders accumulating in anticipation. What’s the basis for expecting different results this time?
On the SIP-031 unlocks: the framing that unlocked tokens “don’t actually come to market” because the Endowment holds most or sells privately to long-term holders is worth surfacing more directly. SIP-031 committed to publicly traceable on-chain addresses and detailed reporting. Could the team publish the actual flow data for the past several months of unlocks, so the modeling reflects observed behavior rather than assumed disposition?
Looking forward to the report back next week on the Endowment-burn analysis, and to hearing the team’s thinking on the demand cohort question.