I created a thread for this contract economy discussion, as it’s indeed offtopic here:
Contract economy challenges on a pay-to-stay Ethereum
What I meant was taxing individual stakeholders in a shared registry contract, not the TTL balance of the contract itself… The TTL balance needs to be filled regularly by someone.
Normally that could happen as an additional expense on calling operations on the contract (who uses it pays, similar to highway tolls), but that becomes potentially untenable if the state is inflated by register-and-forget users, especially if the contract has far more read than write operations.
Say, the ENS registry is mostly used for offchain lookups, so users don’t pay anything at all. Name owners pay when registering their name, and can forget it after.
New registrants will have to pay more and more in fees, in effect subsidizing the storage rent of previous registrants!
Registrants could only be incentivized to pay their part of the rent regularly, if their registrations could be ejected if they don’t. However, this would either require iterating over all registrants with a “tax paid check”, an operation that’s potentially unrunnable on chain due to gas limits, or an off-chain registry and a “tax authority” to manage this (ie. a corporate owner of ENS).