Price as a function of time

[stxnomnom]

Came across this repo while researching Harberger taxes and trying to get one implemented for BNS on the Stacks blockchain. I came up with a modified Harberger tax scheme that uses a price that is a function of time which can help address the issue of a whale or speculator snapping up your domain name while still keeping it affordable for the current owner.

I detailed my approach a bit more here: stacksgov/sips#118

Curious as to what your thoughts are on this approach vs the one you've used of a depreciating license.

[TimDaub]

It's really cool, I like it. hdmap depreciates linearly over time 100% per annum, but using different curve shapes might address quite a few problems that Harberger taxes in the wild have, e.g. that someone can quickly snipe a property. What I like is that someone could, as you pointed out, define a very high tax rate (in the first few days) and then lower it at a later time. This would both lower the relative share of the total tax burden for the assessor and both protect them.

I guess this idea would still be theoretically implementable in hdmap, where e.g. a contract sets the price according to a curve (albeit that'd cost a lot of gas). So better to allow specifying a curve! I'd be happy to collaborate on getting that implemented in Solidity, if you're interested in that.

[stxnomnom]

Thanks for the reply! My primary goal is to get some form of Harberger tax implemented for BNS (and/or ENS), although it might be an uphill battle to get the community to get this implemented in the 'official' contracts, so I may have to go the route of creating a wrapper contract around the official one. Doing so would then required coming up with some form of incentive structure for existing name holders to transfer their names to the wrapper contract and I haven't quite figured that part out yet.

Since my primary focus is on BNS, I'd be more so looking to implement this in Clarity and would certainly welcome collaboration in the creating of a wrapper contract and coming up with an incentive structure to entice name holders to use the contract.

While I think some variation of a Harberger tax is the best model for DNS and I do think my proposal addresses the potential pain points of a 'simple' Harberger tax scheme, I'm still in the process of assessing other HT-like ideas (like depreciating license). From what you've understood of my proposal, what do you think the primary tradeoffs would be between it and a depreciating license approach?