@batbayar, watching the debate over the last two weeks, something has become clear: support for the rental model has arrived through completely different doors.
Your case is cadence—a flow keeps the DOT sink on DOT and makes it recurring. @BizaRre’s is sovereignty—no permanent sale, or the DAO loses control of its core productive asset. @usualsuspect’s is operational, you rent infrastructure, you don’t sell it. Harbour Industrial Capital, just published, is value capture—a buy-back-and-burn only produces a recurring bid if there is a recurring stream to fund it. And the decaying-deposit design from @jonas and @kremena is a rental mechanism in full: bond, decay, reclaim.
Five arguments, five rationales, and one shared foundation that none of us has stated outright: every single one of them depends on the DAO retaining the footprint.
Cadence produces no recurring DOT demand on sold state—once it is sold, that demand terminates. Sovereignty is lost precisely at the point of sale. The buy-back bid is permanently capped at whatever remains unsold. Even the decaying-deposit mechanism, by its authors’ own scoping, prices only “the retained, DAO-controlled supply.” Retention isn’t just one argument among the five; it is the fundamental precondition underpinning all of them.
This surfaces the core question this thread was actually opened to address, and which both the WFC and the pricing design correctly leave open: how much footprint does the DAO actually retain?
Gavin’s note recommends bringing “a substantial portion” into private ownership, but he was explicit that the distribution itself is “not for me to define”—that “time and discourse is needed for DOT DAO to land at a good decision,” and the Island Story closes by handing exactly that decision to the community. This is that discourse. The point isn’t to argue against his recommendation; it’s to take up the invitation and answer the question—because it is the one variable that determines whether the entire framework built for the rental case actually functions, or only operates on the leftover fraction that remains after a sale. Denomination has a deadline and is nearly settled. This has none, which is exactly why it will be answered by default if we don’t address it deliberately.
So I’ll put it plainly to everyone who has been making the rental case from every angle: what is the retained share, and what framework should dictate it? My own answer is outlined in RAMTIME—retain the stock, lease the use, and treat any alienation as a decision that must clear a high bar rather than a default.
But the immediate priority is simply to get the question on the table, in the spirit Gavin asked for. We’ve spent two weeks agreeing on the mechanism, while the one variable it all depends upon sits completely unspecified.