Thanks for the proposal Jude. And sorry for crushing the party right away.
As some of us know - Stacks is confronted with a critical centralization problem. About half a year ago one mining entity gained >51% of the mining power and is censoring the blockchain. To be clear, at the moment they don´t censor transactions (as far as we know) but they rule out other miners who want to start mining. They simply don´t download their blocks from time to time and initiate siblings/forks. This leads to BTC losses, a centralized mining field and a lower stacking yield.
Since last September they are in control of 70-100% of the mining power most of the time!
Atm 77% due to the fact that the F2Pool miner joined the party with around 15%.
We understand that the actual MEV situation is critical for sBTC but unfortunately the SP2Z miner is the last anchor against a 100% centralized mining field at the moment.
For those who are in disbelief, we published a new stacks dump for 2.1 at: Stacks Dump
Have a look at the red (orphaned) blocks e.g. BTC Block 781607. SP11 won Stacks block 99153 but the entity simply ignored it and created a sibling in BTC Block 781607. No block reward for SP11.
You can find all addresses which belong to the entity at the end of the Dump (one color).
Btw. we had forks >4 blocks deep yesterday due to this issue/behavior. Kraken as an example confirms deposits after 4 blocks.
At the moment the entity earns around ~1BTC per day due to the missing competition. BTC which should partly belong to Stackers. What if they would decide tomorrow to raise the tx fees by let´s say 500%?
We appreciate an emergency hard fork but it must include a fix like RFC: L1 Speed Improvements if we want to call Stacks a decentralized blockchain again.
If we add a minimum payout before we solve this centralized situation, we will remove the final obstacle for the controlling entity.