I said that unearned rent is evil, and I stand by that. You should be able to make money by lending money, for example, but not the excessive interest rates credit card companies require because of a government-enforced monopoly on banking. If the p2p lending market were deregulated then interest rates would be much lower, and there wouldn't be such a massive ongoing transfer of wealth from the indebted poor to these companies. That system is evil.

I'm not sure what "unearned income" means. It sounds like a Marxist concept I do not subscribe to, namely that any income not resulting from actual labor is somehow unearned. I don't think that is true - if I lend out money with some risk, I deserve to be compensated for that risk. (As an aside, with unperishable currency like bitcoin I do pull in an unearned rent here due to the power relationship of having coins, separate from the opportunity cost of lending them out. Fixing this is the reason for demurrage currencies like Freicoin.)

The problem is that in the construction of a free and fair, decentralized, distributed, p2p, merged mined side chain for asset issuance and smart contracts - like Freimarkets - there is no room for the people who created the side chain to profit from its use, short of intentionally limiting the system in such a way as to require use of your pre-mined currency (a la XRP), or mandating some sort of centralized transaction tax, either of which could be just as easily removed with a fork.

With pegging and gateways there is no need for another non-perishable, mined currency, and any sort of usage tax on a p2p network is unfair and users would rightfully revolt against. So your best hope is that the network effect of people using your software will prevent people from switching to an unencumbered fork. But given that you are providing no direct service to the people using your chain (or it wouldn't be p2p), that is the definition of an unearned rent, and something I would find unethical to take part in.