You will need to excuse ourselves for the tardiness in this reply, unlike the group of mining pools, we did not get time to prepare articles in advance and whip up our troops!

We are a group of North American and European miners representing, at this point in time, 1.6 exahash/s. We will represent 2.5 exahash/s come May 2020 due to expansion amongst our companies.

We are staunch Bitcoin Cash proponents since the first days, and have been Bitcoin supporters and Big Block supporters for a very long time. Unfortunately most of you do not know us, we are mostly inactive in BCH social media groups, preferring to hang out with our fellow miners in mining discussion groups. Unfortunately, we must remain anonymous at this time due to fear of retaliation from the four signatories of the proposal.

We want to preface this by saying that we are empathic with protocol developers lack of funding, we are not opposing paying developers for their work appropriately, and that it is imperative that this issue gets fixed long term.

Note: we will reply to Jiang Zhuo Er original medium post before being edits, available on the wayback machine at https://web.archive.org/web/20200123082358/https://medium.com/@jiangzhuoer/infrastructure-funding-plan-for-bitcoin-cash-131fdcd2412e

The proposal made by BTC.TOP's CEO Jiang Zhuo Er totally miss the mark on optics over several points. The citation of Chinese Communists Party Deng Xiao Ping philosophy as a guiding precept for Bitcoin Cash is definitely not well received in our rank.

While we don't have much issue with the citation of "Cat philosophy" and "River philosophy" which we interpreted as mere cute Chinese poems, we definitely have concerns at the inclusion of the "Non-Debate Theory".

Mr. Zhuo Er claim that "this debate has been long enough, instead of continuing this pointless debate [...]". We are quite surprised at this claim since as far as we know this is the first time this has been proposed. Who was Mr. Zhuo Er busy debating exactly? Definitely not us, or any one that we pooled.

Mining pools are not miners. Some mining pool happen to also own hashrate that they use on their own pool, we call that "self-mining". It usually amount to a fairly low percentage of the actual pool. A mining pool is a service offered to real miners, in exchange for a small fee. At no point in time are they free to act with this hashrate as if it was their own. The history of Bitcoin is littered with dead mining pool that tried to do exactly just that.

We are all customers of the signatory pools. No one in our group are actually using other pools as we preferred to support BCH proponents. It is totally unfair and unethical that our mining pools uses our hashrate, after charging us a very significant fee to use their services, to force us into a tax.

It is even more unfair that these mining pools are not going to contribute at all. Beside BTC.TOP that has a large amount of self-mining, the other pools are NOT self-mining BCH, they will therefore NOT be affected by the tax and will not be contributing to the fund themselves.

We can not spare any hashrate at this point in time. Bitcoin Cash difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA) has been gamed for the past year or more resulting in very unreliable block times and a lot of suffering for the actual users. We are not switch miners, we currently send between 20-50% of our individual mines toward Bitcoin Cash, the rest is used to mine Bitcoin until Bitcoin Cash price recovers. We do not switch our hashrate between the two currency and we do not use any auto-profit algorithm offered by the pools.

After we lose half our hashrate as we half our block reward several weeks ahead of Bitcoin, and lose another 12.5% hashrate on top of this, we worry about the viability of the currency. Almost all pools in existence and about 20 mining farm will have more hashrate than the Bitcoin Cash network at that point. The network is in a very precarious position and we worry that our opponent will use this to destroy our currency.

"Other Mining Pools" are most of the time a single miner

We also need to point out that BTC.TOP have been one of the main culprit of the attacks on DAA since its inception. They were the one that started that trend, even if they were replaced by another miner since then. They have profited plenty from these attacks, and the users have suffered through unreliable block times.

One of numeral BTC.TOP DAA attacks.

We used to have a long paragraph here but we find Peter Rizun article better than explanation, so we urge you reader to go read it after you are done reading our article.

https://read.cash/@PeterRizun/the-best-of-intentions-the-dev-tax-is-intended-to-benefit-investors-but-will-corrupt-us-instead-012f5dbd

It is absolutely a tax.

It is a compulsory charge, levied by a group in position of power (the signatories along with Bitcoin ABC) in order to fund various public expenditures. A failure to pay will lead to block orphaning.

We would agree that it would not be a tax is the consensus layer would not be changed and miners actually agreed upon themselves to do this. It would be sound game theory indeed.

The problem is that the consensus layer will be changed in a hard fork on May 15th 2020. Therefore even if miners disagree with that measure and the proposal never reaches 51% in support, the disagreeing miners blocks will get orphaned. The exchanges are going to run the new ruleset and will follow the taxed chain, even if it has way less hashrate than the tax-free chain.

This is therefore, a group in position of power coercing another group into a tax.

As we noted a in the prior paragraph, we have our back against the wall and the four signatories will not debate this totally unacceptable proposal with anyone.

We will start withdrawing our support for the signatory pools and move to other pools for the time being. We will in the short term launch a competing BCH pool to offer a voice to miners that disagree with the proposal. We will voluntary donate a 1% of our income to development teams while offering a voice to our miners on how to donate it.

Assuming the proposal is not withdrawn, or modified to be acceptable, we will continue to mine up to the hard fork, which will create our own chain after the fork due to the consensus rule change introduced by the signatories. We definitely plan to obtain more hashrate than the signatories can muster. The market will need to decide in the days following the fork.

We hope the signatories will see the light and remove their "non-debate" clause.

EDIT: If the signatories would decide to reconsider their non-debate clause and take in consideration the comments made by the BCH community, we hope that the BCH supporting pool will implement a way for their miners to donate voluntary like we have suggested here. There exists also several ways to make the BTC.TOP proposal acceptable in our eyes, they must do better.