As always, we start with gratitude.
Thanks to @tjayrush for his clear and experienced take on the AKITA token situation. Thanks to the many wonderful people who have replied and added greatly to our set of possible actions, including (but not limited to) @HelloShreyas @Adamscochran @wschwab @vbuterin @owocki. Thanks also to the many other less helpful respondents for projecting the kind of shadows that only serve to prove there is light.
Proposal
Burn all AKITA tokens by sending them to 0x0.
Reasoning
- We cannot say “AKITA tokens have no real value based on the history of the project and its poorly defined goals and the lack of technical knowledge they reveal” and then turn around and sell them, as if they do have value. This is contradiction at its most absurd.
- Doing the principled thing here constitutes a performative economic speech act about what the Gitcoin community thinks is valuable in the long term. It thereby sets the foundation and precedent we need to make Quadratic Lands truly viable and vibrant.
- If you believe, as I do, that AKITA has no real value, then there is also no real cost to doing this. However, by happy accident and the nature of this interconnected world we live in, this performative speech act is the single best result the AKITA community could hope for. It is as perfectly balanced a way to walk down the middle as could possibly be imagined. Opportunities for this kind of practice do not present themselves too often.
- If, however, you do think AKITA has value, then (a) you should explain why (hopefully in simpler terms that idiots like me can really understand) and (b) propose not just the best way to sell the tokens (handsomely done by @HelloShreyas already imo) but also how to manage them and who takes on the liability for doing so over the next 2 - 10 years depending on what proposal we choose. This kind of admin is, to me, deeply boring and potentially very damaging if we get it wrong.
Conclusion
Value is created by trust in clearly shared truths. This whole situation provides a unique opportunity to perform an economic speech act which sets a very clear and stable precedent for what kinds of truth are shared in Quadratic Land. It seems worth forgoing this very dubious “but we can fund moar open source projects” hand-wavy statement (which does not acknowledge liability, taxable events, who holds the keys to what account, who deploys the Sablier contract etc etc), if you really consider the upside of this precedent.
