| HN Mirror

Shares represent extracting rents from the value exchange ecosystem the company participates in. Selling shares is fine for growing a company. But the perverse part is shareholders then go ahead and sell them to others, sometimes forming a bubble, other times pushing company management to extract ever more rents / eke out ever more profit for them to support sky-high valuations. This investor bubble hurts both consumers and producers and enriches those who passively park their money in things.

Don’t get me wrong, I think in growth stages, stock exchanges do allocate money to fuel productive sectors of society. But during other periods of a company’s life, they are mere zero sum games, where money goes mostly from retail investors to enrich hedge funds.

I think the problem is that there is no limit to shareholder value extraction. The non-productive sector of society parks their money in shares in order to legally plunder the value exchange of producers and consumers.

Now that we have utility tokens, the network can be owned by the participants. Raise money by selling utility tokens at a discount. They have a ceiling after all (the value of the utility token) and you can only sell as much as people believe there will be demand in the end from actual customers.

You can raise money by selling shares temporarily but have the shares be usable as discounts on utility tokens so you can sell them to customers. And that way you can ignore your shareholders clamoring for you to cannibalize your ecosystem for them.