I really like the idea of "making mining more of a privilege" by encouraging contribution to the community. The letter writing to the orphans is such a good idea and one thing that attracts me to BiblePay.
However, I do worry about forcing repentance to mine. I think for sure we should be encouraging people to grow in sanctification, but in my opinion, it needs to be from a place of Godly sorry (2 Corinthians 7:10), rather than motivated by self-interest (in the sense that "now I can mine because I repented").
Perhaps we could spit-ball a few other ideas to encourage community contribution and make mining more of a privilege?
Yes, I really like what you and West had to say about the risk of repentance. On a side note though, I didnt mean to suggest that it was definitely related to Christian repentance, but yes I did mean to suggest it was Bible based repentance.
Lets definitely entertain more ideas, and break this down into even a more basic idea. One that has to do with the privilege to mine to begin with.
Im thinking first of all, this is technically the opposite of one click web mining. Its more of an added step for the privilege to receive biblepay coins from mining, and something that has to be maintained on a regular basis by the miner. Although this might be counter to the popularity argument, I actually think the benefits of this outweigh the risk.
What ends up happening is I think the true believers in BiblePay will stay and maintain the miner, and more coins will then be available for them to mine. These are the people most apt to invest in biblepay. This actually increases our value (making it have intrinsic value) in contrast to bitcoins energy arb equation (when you have just miners with black boxes, the price is related to how much energy it costs to mine a block). That to me sounds like a winning attribute to start with.
So, lets shift the idea a bit. Maybe we let you choose to either maintain a "walk in faith" URL (from forum.biblepay.org) that genuinely explains your walk with God as a miner on your personal URL page on the forum (using minername), IE your sinner testimony + your spiritual encounters and how you grew closer to the Lord. That URL would be mining argument #1 to mine biblepay. It would be policed by BiblePay police department (sanctuaries). For incoherent pages and bad character- who would then lose the mining key.
Alternatively Option #2 is you could prove that you wrote a letter to an orphan within 30 days. One or the other. All others dont successfully mine the block the miner just keeps running.
Orphan letters cannot be reused.
We could potentially change the news creator page to our new letter writer page in-wallet, hash the orphan letter, and use that txid as the input for your mined block (for 30 days).
The URL for your walk-in-Christ or walk-in-God page could be created by you on our forum, and then linked in the mining config setup.
I really like this idea. I would personally do this and I would take a lot of satisfaction from sharing "my story". I think it will encourage other with our experiences.
The idea of having alternative contributions is a good one. Like it!