Consider this proposal for FLOSS funding:
“A new way to fund open source?
- Be open source dev
- Issue a token
- Hold X% of it
- Has 0 value initially
- Award (100-X)% of it over time to folks who contribute code
- Companies then buy token to prioritize bugs & features
- Suddenly, an economy arises!
The basic idea is that the token starts as zero value. There's no ICO, it's just a way for the lead dev to say thank you for people submitting pull requests.
Over time, it organically gains utility, as it becomes a way to pay for the time of people with skill in that codebase.
The value of the token is essentially a bet on how big the open source project will get. If you believe that a project may attain thousands of stars and forks, you buy the token as a way of supporting the devs and capturing upside.”
‒ https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1326313315044192256
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First, let us dismiss the ‘betting’ aspect. There must be something more substantial beyond the value increasing merely because people think it will ‒ that is just the vacuous circularity of tulipism.
So what is this really offering? The answer seems to be: buying a bit of project control ‒ “to prioritize bugs & features”. But if a company wants to pay for a feature, they can, without any token. And if they just want to invest in a FLOSS group, they can anyway. What does ‘tokenising’ actually add (except sprinkling magic crypto dust)?
What does ‘tokenising’ do? It fragments and generalises rights interactions: instead of each buyer going to the owner and haggling an individual deal, there are a ready-made deal packages. A generalised token exchanges for a generalised good. This enables increased participation: buyers now have a lower threshold to reach for both investment and decision: they can pay less for a broader (easier to evaluate) proposition. It is a kind of commoditisation of the exchange.
But what is the right here? Voting on project direction/features ‒ that is the basic thing for sale. But as a general token this is really just an offer of support for the project overall ‒ each token offers no specific info or control of any particular feature. This is not so much a right, as merely charity: you are just paying for the project as a whole to keep going.
On this, tokenisation seems not a net gain, because it works against itself. The increased participation from rights granularisation is antagonistic with the strength of incentive of buying particular feature development. The more ease of participation from rights granularisation, the less incentive for buying features.