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@thumbsup.eth
If stocks didn’t exist, Elon, Bezos, and Thiel wouldn’t be megabillionaires. They’d have to pay themselves and their investors with real income not with this funny money that they can’t actually sell without it rapidly depreciating. All of the insane things rich people do with borrowing money to acquire things essentially for free is because stocks exist, and thus merely eliminating one thing (shares of companies) would radically reshape the world we live in, what wealth means, and the nature of power. Discuss.
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@thumbsup.eth
I just want to preemptively point out that this isn’t a post claiming companies shouldn’t exist. I rarely claim that. It isn’t even a post claiming all companies should be cooperatives; though I often claim that. This is merely stating the fact that, in a world where companies needed to raise money on the expectation that they paid back the actual money (with interest) rather than that the market itself would pay them by buying their shares, that most billionaires would not exist. No guillotines needed, and not even the abolition of capitalism. Just the abolition of meaningless paper that makes the rich richer.
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shazow
@shazow.eth
Ugh I just wrote a short essay thinking through this but Warpcast lost it. Quick rewrite summary of thinking aloud (not directly addressing your point, just pretext): I'm not convinced that it's *technically* practical/possible to force non-transferable non-uniform equity. It makes me think of soulbound tokens, in the way that it's not technically possible (I can always just sell my private key), but it is practically possible to make it annoying to trade them (tightly couple various social commitments that need to be unwound first). It also makes me think of how we like to think of voting rights as non-financial/egalitarian, but in reality they do have market value -- related metaphor is how we're building a market of utility around restaking with things like Eigenlayer. High level: there are some "natural" properties that are unavoidable, but we can find ways to tame them (perhaps by tightly coupling them with things that produce positive externalities). More directly applied thoughts below:
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matthewb.eth
@matthewb
seems like a pretty circular argument, essentially "I think billionaires are bad therefore stocks shouldn't exist because they would have less power as a result" also pretty hard to square this ethos with crypto as a whole which prints tokens out of thin air to create value for e.g. a protocol
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max ↑🎩
@baseddesigner.eth
Totally agree, that's what US debt is about, they just keep getting richer but in reality they're going deeper into negative numbers lmao spending what they haven't earned and getting deals on what's not in their pockets to pull out
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David (d/acc)
@promptrotator.eth
reminds me of the saylor quote that volatility is an engine
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a1z2
@a1z2
I like where this thought experiment begins: stock markets make billionaire CEOs, and the power that comes from that is questionable. To me, though, I wouldn’t author restrictive legislation to make that impossible. Freedom is great. Instead, I’d ask what outcome would I like to see? And that would be easier access for laypeople to get into venture investing. Make it easy for people to get in early to have more transformative wealth opportunities. That’s one aspect I like about crypto.
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