This is a total distraction, but I played with the idea of allowing anyone to revoke for free as long as there still remain 2 other owners.
tl;dr. It doesn't work for fungible tokens.
It produces two problems:
-
In the DEX example, Token A could revoke
right after sharing. That would force Token B or DEX to pay the burn bill. Maybe you can get around that by making burn
a separate function that DEX tells Token A to call. Hard for me to understand the consequences of that.
-
Allowing anyone to pay to revoke ownership would create weird floating token pairs. They have no real value, but can still be shared, perhaps making for weird economics wherein people end up valuing the co-ownership of the token. They feel like Cooper Pairs of the token world because local rules give rise to weird collective “virtual” behavior.
Given that 2 remaining owners is an arbitrary threshold, you could play with implementing nfts that pay burn fees if n
or fewer owners remain. For this, the more general approach would probably be to charge burn due / n - 1
to burn.
For example, given an nft with 100 tokens that has been shared, we can vary the n
that defines the revoke threshold. This would change the burn fee:
n | burn fee
2 | 100
3 | 50
4 | 33.33…
5 | 25
etc.
If someone pays the burn fee, the remaining “burn due” is decreased by that amount. E.g. with an n
of 5, when I pay my 25 tokens to revoke ownership now the remaining group needs to pay off 75 tokens. there’s 4 of them so with that formula burn due / n - 1
that would be 75 / 3 or still 25 to revoke. However, if they could find another address to share it with it would go down to 18.75.
What’s wild about this is it creates an economics of negative pressure: either you have to find a new co-owner to take your spot, or you have to pay to leave the organization. In that world, people would want tools to prevent themselves from receiving tokens, and would have no qualms about sharing | “spending” them. In fact, in that world I would be willing to pay other people to accept ownership.
There’s no reason money has to work as a thing we want. It could also be a thing we flee from. I can see how the behavioral side probably works out better if you’re trying to accrue things rather than avoid accruing them, but it’s still interesting to think about.
This might be an interesting economic model to explore for abundance pricing. What if currency was something you desperately wanted to give away? You go to a restaurant, but instead of them accepting your money, they give this negative pressure token to you. You accept participation in the token in exchange for eating the food. Now, you go to work and they pay you by accepting your negative tokens, etc. It’s a bit like debt, but you’d own it as a group.
Alternatively, maybe you could use it for externality pricing. If I’m an oil company I can accept ownership of a negative pressure token that allows me to drill in a certain area. Years later there’s an oil spill and an oil spill-tracking dao causes the weekly fees associated with carrying the token go up and it becomes expensive for me. I’ll pay an oil cleanup company if they’ll take the token off my hands. The cleanup company fixes the mess and the weekly fees go down, the cleanup company pockets the difference between the payment they received for accepting it and the cost of cleanup. Of course if the cleanup is more expensive than they bargained, they’re stuck paying the weekly fees.
One weird thing about it would be that given that the price to call your personal revoke
is burn due / n - 1
but the cost of collective action is burn due / n
, this could create an incentive for people to pay for collective projects since burn due / n - 1 > burn due / n
. It’s like taxation with compensation, you pay toward the community effort and you actually earn money (or really, lose loss).
Maybe this could be some sort of alternative to quadratic voting for addressing problems of collective action.
To me this behavior is really interesting, but probably not what you mean by fungible token. File it under the category of, “interesting behavior you could implement in your fungible nfts by playing with the rules.”
There’s lots of that sort of thing, by the way.
Treating fungible tokens as just a type of this special nft makes operations more atomic, and I believe it would be simpler to implement (no more rollbacks). But the real benefit is the way in which it increases the space of functionality we can implement.
Two functions and one rule are needed to implement fungible tokens. But what would you get if you had different internal rules? What if you could share
but a shared nft could still be spent by all owners? What if you needed a minimum agreement threshold for spending upon share? What about a minimum agreement threshold for sharing with a new address? You can see how this approach to tokens creates an intermediate space between daos and tokens. Not quite an org, but much more than a token.