Governance

Governance

Property Rights System

Common Property Rights System: Unlike private (e.g. a corporation), public (e.g. a government), or open-access ownership (non-ownership) systems, the Telcoin Platform governance system is a common property rights regime in which four distinct types of miners, as a part of a communal entity, share ownership over the Telcoin Platform and the flows of benefits it generates in common.

Background

The concept of user-ownership is at the core of the Telcoin community’s shared mission, vision, and values; user-ownership is embedded in the DNA of the platform as code and within the governance system as a set of rules that structure ownership over the Telcoin Platform and the benefits it produces.

But what does user-ownership mean and why is it important?

“Although property is sometimes treated as an all-or-nothing concept, ownership and control over resources comes in shades and degrees.

A resulting product of the underlying rules-in-use and material attributes of a particular domain or “thing”, property rights systems vary based on the levels of ownership held by involved actors in relation to some thing.

By understanding the levels of ownership held by involved actors over various goods and services, we can infer, to what degree, users can obtain ownership over a system and what type of property rights system exists. Applying this framework, the proceeding section classifies the Telcoin Platform property regime.

Definitional Clarity

Telcoin is a Common Property Regime

Summary

The primary consumers and producers of Telcoin Platform products and services, and appropriators of TEL issuance and fees, the Miners (which includes Stakers, Developers, Liquidity Miners, and Validators), have formed a communal, legal entity (The Telcoin Association) to govern the rules that authorize individual and shared private property rights over the Telcoin Platform to individual miners and collective organizations stationed across areas of the Platform.

Telcoin Platform: Property Rights System

The Telcoin Platform common property regime is the direct product of the underlying rules-in-use that structure what actions over the system and between actors are required, prohibited, or permitted.

Based on the complex bundle of rights held by the community of actors over the Telcoin Platform, Telcoin is a common property regime.

The miners, including stakers, liquidity miners, developers, validators, who are the primary producers, appropriators of TEL, and providers of the Telcoin Platform, as individuals and as part of collectivities share the following property rights in common over the Telcoin Platform.

  • Individual, Private Property Rights
    • Access: The right to access the platform and consume its services. Miners are a natural consumer of resources produced by their domain of the system and the subsidiary infrastructure levels.
    • Withdrawal Rights: The right to withdraw TEL from the system. Individual miners use TEL as a material input in production processes and perform labor to harvest TEL from the platform and fees based on their efforts, abilities, and consumer demand.
  • Collective-choice, Property Rights
    • Management Rights: The right to manage the system in terms of providing infrastructure and regulating TEL use patterns. Miners, as individuals within Miner Groups and the overall the Miner Assembly, and as Council Members on Miner Councils, possess the collective-choice right to transform the platform by making improvements and regulate internal use patterns by allocating the flow of TEL issuance.
    • Exclusion Rights: The right to participate in determining who may or may not participate in the proceeding rights or exclusion. Miners, as individuals within Miner Groups and the overall the Miner Assembly, and as Council Members on Miner Councils, possess the collective-choice right and duty to determine who may participate in appropriation (harvesting) and management.
  • No one possesses the following right
    • Alienation Rights: The right to sell collective-choice rights of exclusion or management. No one possesses full alienation rights over the shared stock or facility (the Telcoin Platform) and the flow of benefits it generates as management and exclusion rights cannot be sold to others.

    • Given this bundle of rights is held and defined by the community of miners as a whole, the Telcoin property rights system is a common property regime.

    The Taxonomy of Property System: Classifying and Distinguishing Telcoin

    Similar to the taxonomy of goods, property regimes, or the system of interrelated rights held by involved actors over some “thing”, consist of four major categories and vary across a spectrum of “privateness”. Property rights systems can range from fully private regimes to public to common and to non-property regimes or “open-access”. The following section defines private, public, common, and open access regimes, providing examples, and compares Telcoin’s property regime, a common property regime, to the other types.

    Common Property Systems

    Bundles of rights held, defined, and exchanged by some communal entity as a whole, such as in the case of the Telcoin Platform governance system. Groups of individuals are considered to share communal property rights when they have formed an organization that exercises at least the collective-choice rights of management and exclusion in relationship to some defined resource system and the resource units produced by that system. In other words, all communal groups have established some means of governing themselves in relationship to a resource.

    Stock and flow attributes of common property regimes

    Common property offers a way of parcelling the flow of skimmable or harvestable income (the interest) from an interactive resource system without parcelling the principal itself.

    In other words, parcelling flows of TEL is feasible and desirable while parcelling the Telcoin Platform (e.g. Telcoin Network) into pieces for individuals to own, similar to a type-writer, is impractical, undesirable, and much like the internet, infeasible to privatize.

  • Rights to flow: Parceled; the private property rights or the ability to parcel ownership over the subtractive benefits generated by a resource system are privatized to individual rights holders as a part of collective units.
  • Rights to stock: Intact; parcelling the rights to an individual resource system, such as a large forest, is either undesirable, impractical if not impossible and instead rights are shared among user groups over the system. Therefore common property regimes serve as a mechanism for enforcing rules related to interactive resource systems in which the production system is large and indivisible.

      Examples: The Telcoin governance system, agricultural associations in the Swiss Alps, angling associations in Germany, Ethereum and Bitcoin governance.

    • Private Property Systems

    Bundles of rights held by and exchanged among individuals or legally recognized corporate entities; typically including full rights of alienation. An individual or entity is considered to possess full private property rights when those rights are clear, secure, exclusive to the holder, and comprise a full bundle of rights including full alienation rights over the productive stock of the system and flow of revenue produced by it.

    Private Property System Example: Corporations

  • The modern joint stock company (henceforth simply a “Corporation”), involves a complex development of private property.
  • Collectively, the owners of a corporate stock possess the three rights listed above, but they delegate these rights to “The Corporation” and can exercise them only indirectly.
  • In normal circumstances, the rights of use, sale, and proceeds are not exercised by individual stock holders, but by corporate employees.
  • These employees, although they may own Corporate stock, exercise property rights on behalf of the corporation not as stockholders but as officers or employees.
  • In particular, while they are authorized to sell Corporate property, they do so only on behalf of the Corporation and have no right as individuals to the proceeds of the sale. These belong to the corporation and ultimately to the stock holders.
  • The stockholders participate in this arrangement in the hopes that they will receive benefits from the corporation.
  • These benefits are, almost universally, in cash, not in kind.

      Example: Owners of GM stock do not receive their dividends in autos and spare parts, and may not even buy the products of the company.

    • Comparing Private Property to the Telcoin Common Property System

    By contrast, the owners in common property system, such as in Telcoin, typically own the “source” and the “flow” in different senses.

  • They jointly “own” the common pool resource (“CPR”.)
    • That is they jointly possess the right to use it, and to determine who else may use it and in what way.
  • But, they individually own what they harvest from the CPR.
    • Each individual acquires the rights of use, transfer, and proceeds to whatever he takes from the CPR following sanctioned procedures.
  • While corporate owners typically employee others to exercise their property rights and produce a stream of cash benefits for them, commoners typically use their common property to produce benefits for themselves in kind.
  • Even in cases in which commoners employee others to exercise their rights to the commons, the individual commoners manage the appropriative process, contribute resources that are vital to it, and receive an individual stream of benefits in kind. They act, one might say, more like entrepreneurs than like corporate shareholders.
  • Unlike Corporate Property, where full rights of alienation exist and can be exercised, as an example, by trading the company’s stock, no actors or bodies on Telcoin possess full ownership rights of alienation over any component of the common system.

    • Public Property Systems

    Bundles of rights held by official agents of some unit of government. A rights system in which a body which represents the general public, such as a government, possesses full property rights over some domain, making it available to the general public for joint use and consumption.

    Stock and flow attributes of public property regimes

  • Rights to flow: Intact; rights to enjoy the benefits produced by some thing are public property.
  • Rights to stock: Intact; rights to the production system are intact, not privatized, and instead held as public property.

      Examples: A state government with ownership over a state park.

    • Comparing Public Property to the Telcoin Common Property Regime

    The Telcoin Platform is governed bottom-up by a community of miners rather than top-down by a governmental entity.

    Open-Access Systems

    No effective restrictions on use of resources. Open-access regimes have long been considered in legal doctrine as involving no limits on who is authorized to use, harvest from, manage, or exclude users from exercising the aforementioned rights over a good(or service).

    Examples: The open seas and atmosphere are two classical examples where open-access or “non-property” regimes exist.

    Comparing Open-access Systems with the Telcoin Property Regime

    The Telcoin Platform “owners”, or the Miners, possess rights of access, withdrawal, management, and exclusion. The Telcoin governance system possesses the collective-choice right to devise who may withdraw how many TEL units from the Platform; whereas no such arrangement exists in an open-access property system (or non-property system).