
Tokenized Public Goods – A New Store of Value - carleverett
https://medium.com/@tpgwhitepaper/tokenized-public-goods-a-new-store-of-value-83b91c53d436
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gus_massa
If I buy the 1% of Amazon (the company) I get the 1% of the anual dividends,
and the 1% of the voting rights. It's not possible to go, pick up a 1% of the
buildings, but there are a lot of regulations to ensure that I get
approximately my share and I get enough information. If I buy the other 99%
then I own the it and I can do whatever I want with it, like selling all the
assets.

If I buy the 1% of Amazon (the river or the rainforest) I don't get anything,
and my opinion is not special. It's not possible to go, pick up a 1% of the
trees. Even if I buy the other 99% I don't have anything.

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carleverett
Public good tokens aren't meant to be ownership rights to that public good.
Instead of tokenizing the Amazon (the rainforest), you'd tokenize an outcome,
like the reforestation of the Amazon. If done right, the valuation of that
token becomes how much that public good is valued.

An overly simplistic way of doing that for the Amazon is to issue 100 tokens
every year and distribute them to people that planted trees in the Amazon. If
someone plants 20% of all new trees this year, they get 20 tokens.

I'm ignoring a lot of challenges like making sure these trees are actually
planted, and that they'll survive, and that these planters aren't the same
people destroying other trees. But if you address these challenges then you
have a token whose supply growth is limited and that allows investors to
create a market for people to compete with each other to plant the most trees
in the Amazon.

At the very least, it's a much better way of investing in Amazon reforestation
than a donation, and I'm sure many millions are donated for this every year.
But more important you're creating a store of value token whose value is
backed by its ability to create a public good - value that's never been stored
before. If you scale that up, you're creating a lot of wealth and you're
changing human behavior.

~~~
gus_massa
It's like a fundraiser, but in the reverse order ...

