- Now we have only one step in pricing (8 characters). Maybe there should be more? Short names would be very expensive and with every character price goes cheaper?
That is already possible with Graphene. You can charge a different fee depending on the number of characters in the name up to 8 characters (after that it is non-premium and the cost is fixed).
- Is auction possible? If you want to register a name, you would have to wait for a period (like 24 h or a week) and during that time everybody else could see what name you are going to register and make a bigger offer for it if they see it valuable. This would propably optimise the income that Bitshares gets from name selling.
The way I see it there are three significant economic models for names (there are infinite variations of course, but these are the three that are most important in my opinion):
- Pay a fee to register a name where the fee price is determined by an algorithm and not by the market (the algorithm could be as simple as a fixed fee, or it can charge different prices based on character length like Graphene does today), and then you fully own that name forever with no other costs (maybe a very small fixed "I'm still alive" fee every year).
- Use an auction to determine the initial price of a new name (or a name that has since been lost due to the owner not paying the small fixed "I'm still alive" fee), but after the name is sold, the owner gets to fully own that name forever with no other costs (other than the small fixed "I'm still alive" fee).
- Use a leasing model. The "owner" of a name does not truly own it. They initially use an auction to buy a limited time lease to control the name and the right to extend the lease without disruption. However, each time they get the opportunity to re-extend the lease, they need to pay a fee for the extension that is determined by market forces. An auction system could allow the blockchain to know what the market value of the lease extension would be, and it would require the current lease owner to pay some fraction (perhaps 100%) of that price before their lease expires to extend their lease or else they forfeit the lease to the highest bidder at the end of their lease.
We can implement any subset (including all three) of these economic models. However, each of them require their own namespace. This means the same name can exist in all three economic models and they are disambiguated by the namespace they belong in.
My thoughts are that we should have at most two namespaces (one for domain names and potentially one for account names). I think economic model 1 or 2 is appropriate for account names (if we even have any) and economic model 2 or 3 is appropriate for domain names. Domain names could also have a "default account" parameter that points to an account ID. Therefore, even if we get rid of account names, domain names could still be used as a sort of account name for those who choose to pay the cost of maintaining them (the rest of the people wouldn't bother with account names which as I have discussed
elsewhere aren't actually necessary).
My first preference is to have account names follow economic model 1 (despite the squatting potential) and domain names follow economic model 3. My second preference is to have account names follow economic model 2 and domain names follow economic model 3. My third preference is the get rid of account names and only have domain names following economic model 3. My fourth preference is to get rid of account names and only have domain names following economic model 2.
One other possibility is to mix economic models in the same namespace depending on how an algorithm classifies the name. For example, we could have domain names follow economic model 3, but account names would either follow economic model 1 or 2 depending on the length of the name. An account name that is 10 characters or longer could follow economic model 1, but account names that are less than 10 characters long would follow economic model 2.