Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

True. They can keep you out of the store. Under some circumstances they can indeed keep you out of the store. However it's still the US and the reasons for keeping people out of stores are restricted, and we've all learned in high school why.

But, once inside, an offer is made through the pricetag and accepted the sale is final. Before payment, before ... The whole point of price tags is making an offer. So if you are inside the store, take the good, and accept the sale at the price on the tag, obviously a court will rule both sides are in agreement about the sale and price at that point (NOT at the cash register) and that's that.

Additionally, money legislation makes cash the universal cop-out. You can always choose to settle a debt through cash. And that debt is what's on the price tag, the offer that was accepted, nothing else. In other words, the cashier and the manager, hell the CEO comes down and refuses? Give them cash and walk out with the goods. Perfectly legal thing to do. The sale was already final, and this settles the debt. Done and done.

This is why messing with price tags in stores is such a serious offense.

This goes pretty far in law. You can actually go to the IRS, ask to pay with cash money, and they'll let you pay your tax bill cash. Cash is the universal cop-out.

https://www.irs.gov/payments/pay-your-taxes-with-cash

This is a simpleminded parody of how a market works. Competition isn't concentrating wealth, it's driving down prices. The value ultimately flows to the consumers.

When PE salvages a failing enterprise, it's increasing the overall value of that enterprise, even if that means selling off parts that still have value. Those parts are made available to others at prices lower than they otherwise would have had to pay.

Wealth concentration flows from impediments to competition. There is no shortage of PE firms competing for these opportunities.

I mean, their counter-parties know all of this, but the fact that PE assets don't need to be marked to market on a regular basis can be good for a lot of these investors, as it introduces a delay in the spiral that can otherwise occur with public assets.

Like, if AI collapses, everyone's gonna sell Treasuries to cover losses as they are super liquid (mostly), but the PE assets can pretend that they're still worth whatever, thus reducing margin calls.

PE is generally bad, but their LP's are not entirely stupid and the ability to mark to imagination is worth a bunch of money sometimes.

There can be many models. One model is just to have shares expire after a certain point, the same way options do. Or undergo demurrage (a discount that grows from 0 to 100% over a decade, for instance, where the remaining % from the sale goes back to the ecosystem and is distributed as UBI to all tokenholders).

In fact, staking your shares and getting a perpetual flow of utility tokens, or selling the shares, could be a good compromise. But the shares would cease to confer voting power or dividends. The dividends would be paid out in the utility token itself. So the utility tokens might get devalued if there are too many of them, or they could be burned as transaction fees for instance, reducing their supply. There are a ton of possibilities.

Reinterpreting shares as something like a bond with a yield in the ecosystem's own currency makes things much more sustainable. Yes, the shareholders would still want the ecosystem's growth to outpace the token issuance, but also, they could just increase the fees' burn rate of tokens. But that's like extracting rents. So yes, I think eventually, shares should simply get less and less dividends over time. Look at the Miracle of Worgl and their currency undergoing demurrage, for instance.

In the ideal scenario, though, new companies would have no IPO ever, only ICO of utility tokens. Just make IPOs almost impossible to do from a regulatory point of view. It's becoming rare anyway. This would mean that early shareholders would get their returns by staking shares and receiving utility tokens which they sell to ecosystem participants (so they're incentivized to help grow the entire ecosystem, refer new customers etc.) And eventually, the market cap of the shares is totally phased out due to demurrage and the utility tokens is all that remains.

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