Smooth, you are one of the rare witnesses, together with the new four witnesses I named in the post, who are actually doing a lot for the network, and providing full transparency. I totally agree that the projects you have been supporting are important and useful, and that these projects should be funded by the community.

What I don't agree with, however, is that witness pay is the right mechanism for that. Witness pay is an old and inadequate artifact inherited from Bitshares' DPoS at the time where there was no alternative way for the network to fund development, marketing and outreach efforts. DPoS, at the core, is exclusively concerned with securing the network, and posits that the blockchain should be validated by a quorum of delegates elected by proof-of-stake as being the most trustworthy and the most unlikely to collude. Optionally said delegates would receive an indemnity from the network to compensate for their cost running a node. But there was no assumptions grounded in game theory that would justify any form of causal link between delegates receiving a compensation and their being trustworhty. Thinking about that objectively, who would trust someone whose trustworthiness would be a function of income?

The reason the larger delegate pay was introduced as a way to pay for developments, marketing etc is entirely orthogonal to trust and to the original role of delegates as required by DPoS / federated consensus. Back then at the time it was introduced in Bitshares, there was no real way for the blockchain to "hire" people, so it was proposed that, since delegates would receive an indemnity for running a node, it would be possible to bump up that indemnity to a more significant sum and use it to hire useful people who could contribute to developing the network. This was a hack. Nothing more than a hack. And a dirty hack by all standards. First, it was actually defeating the security model by making it less important to hire delegates based on trust and integrity, and more important to hire delegates based on technical or marketing skills. Secondly it was completely broken from a practical and economic perspective because since every delegate had to be paid the same amount to avoid a complicated decision process at consensus level, paying people the right salary for the job was near impossible and led to even hackier system with people taking several delegates (hereby weakening further decentralization) and/or foregoing a part of their witness pay etc. Another way this was broken was that there were far fewer delegate slots than contributors to the community, so whereas the most politically apt or largest contributors managed to get one or several delegate positions, smaller or less politically apt but none the less sincere and valuable contributors were entirely left out of the scheme and expected to contribute for free when their peers were being paid by the network. This in turn created some recent in the community, as it always turns out to be the case when introducing money and favoritism in a community of volunteers. The end result was terrible and we all know how things ended. Even paid delegates got a massive dopamine crash when the price went down and their delegate pays ceased being perceived as attractive. By then the volunteering spirit had long been dead.

The mistake Bitshares made was conflating two functions that had no business being conflated: that of trustee in the delegated consensus, and that of employee of the blockchain. A trustee should be voted in based on his/her trustworthiness and integrity. Being trustworthy and acting with integrity should be his/her only function. Because trust and money don't mix well together, a trustee should be a volunteer, and shouldn't receive any significant pay other than a basic indemnity for covering node management costs that should be a fixed sum decided by the network and applied equally to all trustees. Because a trustee is a volunteer, overhead should be kept at the absolute minimum. This trustee is what a delegate in Bitshares should have been, and what a witness in Steem should be. You don't want highly skilled developers for that role. You want very reliable people with a high reputation at stake, and from very different backgrounds so that the chance they would collude is minimal. You want to have organizations as Wikileaks, the FSF, the EFF, some cypherpunks, some activists, some highly trusted people from the Bitcoin community etc. Again, money is totally orthogonal to this role, because real integrity is something that no amount of money in the world will be able to buy. These are the type of people we want to be witnesses in Steem, and if they are the idealist and visionary type that we really expect in that kind of position, they will appreciate the honor and won't care that much about what you give them as a compensation for the tiny job of running a node.

Now for the role of employees of the blockchain, you want to pick people exclusively on the classic hire criteria including their technical skills, past experience, salary expectation etc. And you want to give them the right level of salary based on their market value. Even better, you want to hire them to do specific things, and pay them per project. That wasn't technically easy to achieve back then in Bitshares, but that a totally different story in Steem, because Steem has got an extremely versatile and powerful funding mechanism built in: inflation-powered vote-based funds allocation. So far, in it's very basic current form where people just upvote what they like without the possibility to set clear financial targets, this system has already allowed to finance a large number of projects, including some that you have been instrumental in pushing. This mode of funding has worked suprisingly well, and can easily be improved further by introducing kickstarter kind of features like a minimum funding threshold, multiple funding levels with different levels of achievement, and more flexible time targets.

In other words, unlike in Bitshares, there is absolutely no need in the case of Steem to try to shoe horn hiring and funding into the narrow and very restrictive model of fixed pay delegates, in particular when doing so is actually defeating the security model of DPoS. Just an example: I won't give a name, but among current witnesses, there is one witness who has been found to recklessly game the liquidity reward mechanism and derive very high profits at the expense of the network, which led core developers to removing liquidity incentives altogether. Is that a good example of integrity and trustworthiness? Can we trust this witness not to side with an attacker if this can net him a large profit? I for one would much rather have trusted community members regardless of their skill levels beyond the simple skills required to securely run a node.

So to go back to your case, and to the case of those other witnesses who may be doing some projects on the side, there is absolutely no need and in fact no justification for these projects to be funded from a fixed witness pay or to be connected at all with the function of witness.

Witnesses and hiring + project funding should be entirely separate functions, with the former sticking strictly to the DPoS requirements and voted in by PoS based on the sole criterion of trustworthiness and integrity with minimal indemnity meant to cover the costs of running a node, and the later being funded directly, on a case by case basis, by the community. Since the funds currently allocated to paying fixed gorgeous salaries to 19 witnesses would be reallocated to the reward pool, this wouldn't change the funding level enjoyed by those witnesses who are sincere and honest in their desire of serving the community and furthering the reach of Steem. On the contrary, because all the free riders will be off the tap, I expect funding level of deserving projects to be actually much better, and the overall confidence in Steem to recover promptly which would help the price and further help funding projects.