70 ICP! Here is HOLHO #2.
This is a spicy one and 100% colored by my attempts to raise funds in a bear market:
We should remove merge maturity from neurons and make everyone either pay taxes or off set their gains with expenses back into the community.
Tax avoidance is stupid and lowers the velocity of ICP. We should force stakers to either form for-profit orgs that can offset gains with expenses or encourage donations to non-profits that can invest in the ecosystem.
Taxes suck, but there are many ways to avoid those. Simply by forming an organization that works on the IC, you can turn the expenses you incur by building for the platform into losses that offset your staking profits.
There are also charity non-profits like ICDevs.org that will do this for you to a certain extent and up to a threshold. Maybe you should start one in your jurisdiction that benefits your tax treatment?
The key here is that by forcing people to claim their ICP dividends as ICP it forces an action. If we all just hodl and mergle there will never be any ICP available to builders. I get it, merging is an easy way out and the returns are really nice(as long as the price isn’t falling 90% while you stack at 20%). But right now everyone is taking the easy way out. Maybe a few VCs are stepping up, but is that who you want leading the new internet?