Addressing Community Mentioned Alternatives
First of all, we need to understand alternatives, as it is not quite clear whether storage rent will be enough by the end of the current emission and how smooth mining rewards will be:
· switching to PoS or doing checkpointing (via another blockchain, on-chain or off-chain protocol) is radically changing security assumptions of the protocol. This should not be considered.
· introducing some contracts for miners to participate voluntarily (some ideas were proposed on the forum) may most likely fail, and it is hard to predict how such things will play out.
Additional Potential Changes Miners Can Consider
A mild approach would be to repurpose transaction fees and storage rent towards paying some % to reemission contract.
Transactions fees are not part of the protocol actually, so changing this contract can be done painlessly. This change would require miner consensus.
Changing storage rent contract according to most miners logic could be seen as monetary policy change, but this is also possible for miners to vote on.
The only issue is to predict is whether the collected funds can be enough, also, reemission contract would be more complex (as it needs to pay not fixed amount per block but rather a share in this case likely).
EIP-27
Now, about the nature of proposed change in EIP-27.
Technically, an emission curve change is different in Bitcoin and Ergo. In Bitcoin, new bitcoins are created out of thin air according to protocol code, emission curve can be changed via hard-fork only.
In opposite, in Ergo emission is done via smart-contract, and so things like EIP-27 are possible with soft-fork.
With EIP-27, total emission remains the same, emission contract remains the same. Miners will send some part of mining rewards to future. To do that they first collectively agree.
The only restrictive thing here is set by miners for a miner. And the new rule is soft-forkable, so miners can switch it off/or change it in the future with vote.
I think crypto-economic security gains outweigh possible controversy behind this proposal.
