I think @onelineproof is confused about what serves to prevent double spending. It is not the reward per se, it is the work that goes into the hash computations, the Proof-of-Work.  
There is some logic to saying that the larger the reward the likelier more work will go toward mining a block, but it is not a direct correlation: it is strictly the actual computational work that goes into finding the block versus the difficulty of surpassing that same work, (compounded as it becomes a string, more than one block),  which is the actual security.   Not the reward the blocks carry.

He is making an assumption that the higher the reward the more work will go into finding the block. This is a reasonable assumption to make in general, but I believe its flawed logic in the case of merge-mining, for the reasons already given. To quote an old proverb, you "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth."   ie, It's basically a "freebie", so you shouldn't complain that it's not as big as the reward someone gets when they work harder for it. It's falling on your lap; you're getting it for almost no effort.

@dbkeys When can we expect new hard fork? I can't find that information anywhere.
Changes you described are more than welcome at this point.

What those graphs above show is that there were many periods of time where the emission rate was higher than it is today; only in Fall 2014 to Fall 2016 was it low because there was not much interest in Bitmark at that time and it took a long time for the difficulty adjustment algorithm to catch up. Additionally, statistics like this are not justifications for changing the target emission rate.

If you want to see more interesting statistics, see the wallet rich list: https://chainz.cryptoid.info/btm/#!wallets.
There is one wallet with 2.4 million marks (8.6 % of the total eventual 28 million Bitmarks) and one wallet with 1.5 million marks (5.4%).
You can also see here https://chainz.cryptoid.info/btm/#!rich that there is a single address with 1.6 million marks.
These large wallets are likely individual miners who were mining Bitmark when hashrate was low (uncompetitive), due to the native only mining for a cryptocurrency that has a small number of users. With merge mining this wouldn't happen as mining would be much more competitive and no individual miner can get such a large share of the mining rewards. As an investor I would actually be more worried about those big wallets dumping coins instead of merge miners that can only take little bites at a time.

Anyone looking at those statistics (rich list) will immediately think, whoa that's some really centralized distribution, almost as if the coins were premined. Seeing that makes me rethink whether it is even worth trying to save Bitmark. The only way I see for Bitmark to reedem itself against this is to continue mining now with FULL merge miner rewards. And the question of whether or not to modify the supply schedule is a no brainer as I explained before.

The biggest wallet without any doubt is Poloniex wallet.

Thanks for the clarification @psycodad. And this is what was happening. Nobody but Mr./Ms. Selfish mined Bitmark until they left, and shortly thereafter we switched to 8mPoW with DGWv3 anyway.  

 IIUC, this selfish-mining is possible (at least in part) because a larger chain can appear out of the blue and is accepted by all the nodes, because it is the longest, most-work chain, although the "honest" nodes had not seen the selfish node before at all.
Thus, the "selfish" part: The Selfish Miner did not share their work (and thus allow possible competition) until they were sure they hade a stronger chain to show.   Can you shed some more light on this ?

Yes, this happened to Verge and is the reason they went 5mPoW.

if you two are right, what truth should I believe?

It is not true that I didn't compromise. I personally believe merge mining is better for security and decentralization than native mining, but even if you do want to reduce the rewards of merge miners, I did accept that to a certain degree. But dbkeys mixes two things that are completely separate: 1) Reducing the reward for merge miners relative to native miners, 2) Modifying the emission schedule. (1) can be done in various ways without (2). You can see the github thread for 3 of these ways: https://github.com/project-bitmark/bitmark/issues/68#issuecomment-408140614. But now dbkeys is saying that those other ways would have merged miners quickly bringing up the peak hashrate of the native algo variant, and messing up the CEM calculations, so he wants to keep native and merge miners with the same difficulty adjustment, just with a different reward. But you can still respect the supply schedule. Just like DGW adjusts the difficulty to meet a target time for blocks, you can adjust the "bonus" paid to native miners to meet the emission rate target (taking into account CEM), with small variations about the mean (also other ways I thought of that don't require any variations). So you can think of the bonuses as money saved by paying merged miners less. Like I said, I would like merge mining to remain fully dominant, but at least this solution would respect the emission schedule, thus I wouldn't call it a scam.

Then they might say, oh well lowering the emission rate will help to delay the need for a fee market. But you need to understand what the point is of Bitcoin and other decentralized cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin was created in order to prevent the manipulation of the money supply by central bankers. A predetermined algorithm is used instead of people deciding what the proper emission should be at any given time. You can even read this in the bitcoin wiki: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply
If the rate could be modified on the fly then insiders could use that to profit. They could buy before the announcement of a lowering of the rate, and sell right before the rate is announced to be increased. In general it can be used to temporarily create favorable conditions for special interests. Also miners look at this and see that the rewards are not stable, no good track record, and are more likely to attack the chain as a result.

There is also 2 other changes in dbkeys' fork. Only 30 periods instead of 365 are used for calculating the peak hashrate, and CEM can reduce the reward by up to 80% instead of 50%. I can give you many reasons why these changes would harm users, but it is important to understand that any drastic protocol change without clear proof that it benefits users is clown shoes. As for setting a fork height without a miner supermajority, it is dangerous for users who may end up sending money on the wrong fork. It's irresponsible.

As for the quote of me saying I'm stubborn, well yes it's true and I have high standards for some things, maybe higher than average. I don't think I'm such a good programmer, I just work hard on whatever I'm passionate about and pay attention to details. I mostly said that because they were pressuring me to do something I don't want to do, so I didn't want to give them false hope. I would be surprised if my comments on Slack are still publicly viewable, as I was banned from there a month ago by 82ndabnmedic, just for expressing my disagreement with the fork. I can also find you quotes of dbkeys saying how he wants to send a percentage of miner rewards into a developer fund (that was blocked by Melvin) and how he wants to consider master-nodes or proof of stake voting or mining... And for the price, who knows. I think $0.10 is a strong bottom, even with all merge miners selling. A 1 satoshi price would be almost impossible and it was an exaggeration. $0.10 to $1 is easy within a year. But people have to actually work hard to improve the protocol instead of coming up with ways to work less.

As for the person who said my thoughts about double spend protection are wrong, let them come here or any other open/uncensored forum and I can debate them. I think they are wrong about this, and also there is a nice thread about merge mining security in the bitcoin-dev archives: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2014-January/003981.html. I think one conclusion from that is that as long as you are not a scam-coin, merge mining is quite secure, and still the best you can do compared to the other alternatives.

I think currently, from the Bitmark community, there is just a few people who strongly support dbkeys' fork and most people don't care or don't understand the issues. If you see the github thread, I also initially said "sure why not, let's reduce the merge miners reward by 50%". But after more careful thought, I changed my mind on that and definitely don't want to mess with the emission schedule. On my side I see some kind of support from the following users in this thread: psycodad, tync, Matiel. Also I had some level of support by someone who contacted me privately. But I need strong support from at least a few people. So please make it known or contact me privately at least, and like that I can try to submit a petition to exchange to include my vision for the fork, and even let dbkeys have his vision under the BTM ticker if he wants (though I think putting scam-coins on an exchange would be unwise for the reputation of the exchange). I am in good contact with people who work in Trade-by-trade, but I don't want to use my access to push my own vision and I definitely need an exchange to make sure I am not the only person mining the chain. So this is the last chance! dbkeys' fork may activate in less than a week.

I think in the future sidechains will enable multiple currencies to exist on one blockchain (for the purpose of paying miners for transactions). They cam also further decentralize mining (no merge mining 2 sidechains of a chain at once). You could have for example Bitcoin being transferred to the Bitmark blockchain, and people can choose to pay with Bitcoin or Bitmark, just like now USD can be used in almost any country, but you could still use the local currency if you want. To transfer the Bitcoin would have a waiting time, so sometimes it would be better to use the MARKS, or marks could just be a backup, in case there are some problems with Bitcoin. So I don't think sidechains will completely kill altcoins, and still, with the best computers and moon-math, it is very inefficient to use sidechains in a trustless manner. The network effect (strong bonds between P2P nodes) with those nodes resistant to many attacks is what makes a coin a good store of value.

TeamBitmark is a puppet account of 82ndabnmedic I assume, since the writing style is the same. What vote? Where did it take place? On slack where people get banned for disagreeing with the fork. How can you not get 100% support in such an environment?

I actually have a significant stake in Bitmark, it's not just peanuts. If I were to lose all my marks, that would be a very significant setback financially. I do have skin in the game, but for sure I would sell what I have on dbkeys' fork. The price of Bitmark never surpassed $1 except for a short time last winter when Bitcoin peaked, and the market cap never surpassed $7 million, except for that short burst. The BTC value of marks in 2014 is a useless measure since there was much less altcoins at the time, bitcoin value was lower, and there was much less marks in circulation. Same with any other BTC price market cap. The only meaningful marketcap is USD since that's the dominant world currency right now. From 1.2 million to 7 million market cap is quite easy (we just saw a rise this month from 1 million to 1.2 million). Reducing the emission rate will not magically increase the price, it will reduce selling pressure so investors can more easily dump. Any gains will likely be temporary and unstable.

The email I listed previously in my signature seems to have problems so I am changing it back to my previous email:
<my username>@gmail.com
Like I said, this is the last chance if you support the uncorrupted version of Bitmark. Block reward changes that favor special interests will be visible on the blockchain forever. You cannot hide it.