The populace has spoken and I shall now rant about #governance tokens. <thread>
It has been shown in prior research that governance rights are not that valuable, fundamentally speaking. stout.com/en/insights/ar…
Essentially, a premium you pay for voting stock, vs. non-voting is roughly 3-5% of the stock price. 
Essentially, issuing a governance token with no features other than governance means that the fundamental value of the supply would be 1/20th to 1/30th of what it would be if the token also gave its holders a right to some share of revenue.
Governance tokens are not easy to price. Banzhaf indices are:
1. extremely sensitive to the composition of shareholders other than yourself
2. mean different power for different people
3. non-linear, and, in fact, highly non-continuous in their behavior.
1. extremely sensitive to the composition of shareholders other than yourself
2. mean different power for different people
3. non-linear, and, in fact, highly non-continuous in their behavior.
But even so, Banzhaf indices are largely irrelevant to start with. They calculate the probability of being able to swing a vote, among a collection of random distributions of other votes. But votes are not random.
They are determined by an existing (and usually complex) set of alliances and opinions distributed among the voters. In truth, unless you hold a VERY significant percentage of tokens, and have a few similarly-large friends, you stand no chance.
All this means is that tokens whose price is determined by their voting rights alone would create a horrid, unpredictable, and unprice-able market.
For example, you can't expect them to increase in value just based on the increased value of the project they govern, you must look at all shareholders, where tiny differences in their composition may create wild swings in fundamental value.
But here's the worst part. Ability to buy votes has always been a pretty horrendous idea. Rather than serving as a protection layer against exploiting a good project for short-term gain, governance tokens open up a gaping attack vector.
To prevent this, the price to buy voting rights should ideally always exceed losses caused by accidental or intentional mismanagement of the organization.
But as I said above, 1. Governance tokens have low fundamental value on their own, and 2. voter apathy makes buying a controlling vote generally much cheaper.
And think about what gives governance tokens a value to begin with. It is literally the question of "how much is it worth for me to have control over this cryptoeconomy?"
Control clearly is a neutral term. It could be control to a good end or to a bad end, governance tokens don't care. In truth, extractive behavior is almost always more profitable in the short-term than contributive behavior.
Play by the rules in MakerDAO, and get your X% APR. Take over MakerDAO in a hostile bid and issue a million new DAI tomorrow.
It is granted, MKR is not just a governance token, but a revenue share plus governance. But if you consider the same dynamic for a governance token that has no non-governance-related fundamental value, you see a horrifying picture.
I don't think, however, anyone really cares about any of this. After all, this discussion is about fundamental value, and fundamental incentives, and we haven't seen any crypto trade on fundamentals ever.
My arguments apply to rational, efficient market, which this ain't. So there... </rant>
