Half a TANK?
When we designed the tokenomics for the TANKS token, we wanted to do something different and fun, because that’s the spirit of what “Tanks! For Playing” is about.
We wanted the TANKS token to be like an arcade token, indivisible and with a finite supply. You could even imagine that one TANKS token represented a real-life tank. There aren’t many tokens out there that are indivisible so it sounded like a unique selling point. If an indivisible token had a dwindling supply — would it have more value than if it was divisible? If you squinted, it would look like an NFT (minus the fungibility part).
Maybe…
We never really went into the details in the whitepaper around this “feature” — merely mentioning that the token would be indivisible.
The divisibility (or lack thereof), in a game that is all about division— was not something that was thought of too much after it was written, however as time has gone on and the more conversations we’ve had with people, the less we’ve been able to defend it.
What is divisibility
Let me break down for you what divisibility is.
We are all familiar with dollars and cents, there are many currencies out there which use this system (USD/AUD/etc). One dollar is one hundred cents and you can’t really have less than one cent in your bank account. The dollar is therefore divisible but cents are not — you can divide a dollar into one hundred cents, but you cannot divide cents down further. The precision to which a currency can be divided is measured by how many decimal places it supports. In the case of the dollar, it has 2 decimal place precision (hereby known as a decimal of 2).
Cryptocurrencies are revolutionising the banking system, and with it they are exploring new frontiers of divisibility. Bitcoin for example has 8 decimal places — i.e. it is possible to send and receive as little as 0.00000001 BTC (0.0006 USD at todays price of 60k USD/BTC). If every person on earth had the smallest unit of Bitcoin, it would only require 77 BTC! Should the price of BTC ever reach $1B / BTC (thank you hyper-inflation) — the smallest unit would cost 0.01 USD, suddenly the smallest unit may not be enough…
Ethereum takes it to the next level (of course it does…) by supporting 18 decimal places of precision! That’s quite hard to fathom on it’s own so another way to put it would be to say if every person on earth had a billion of the smallest unit of Ethereum it would only require about 60 ETH. For the chemistry nuts out there, that’s about the same precision as individual atoms in 0.2 mg of carbon. (P.S. If I’m wrong with these numbers, just read the comments, whenever someone is wrong on the internet there will be someone around to correct them…)
What does an indivisible token look like?
There is no mathematical difference between an indivisible token and a divisible token, it’s just a question of where the decimal point is located.
For example, there will only ever be 21 million BTC BUT given BTC is divisible to 8 decimal places, there is a total of 15 digits to play with. BTC could have started as indivisible with 2,100,000,000,000,000 coins (2.1 quadrillion) and it would have been mathematically equivalent. One important difference between the two would be the value of each BTC which would be now be fractions of a cent.
In fact there are many “meme” coins/tokens out there which have insane numbers of supply. Shiba Inu for example has 394,796,000,000,000 SHIB tokens! (394 Trillion)
Let’s imagine that there is an indivisible token. What would it look like? Would it even work on a DeX?
As mentioned before, there are limits to precision and as such we already deal with the consequences of indivisibility, but these usually happen at decimal precisions we do not care about.
Let’s imagine a token called IND which is indivisible and is traded on UniSwap.
You connect to UniSwap and see the price of IND is 0.1 IND/ETH. If you had 1 ETH and there was sufficient liquidity, you might expect to get 10 IND tokens. So far so good. What if you only had 0.05 ETH? Now we have a problem. A divisible token would have given you 0.5 IND — but IND cannot be divided! You cannot trade. You are locked out of owning ANY IND until you can spend 0.1 ETH.
Back to the example of buying 1 ETH — with slippage and fees, you’d likely be only able to get 9 IND tokens instead of 10. It wouldn’t cost the full 1 ETH — but you wanted to spend 1 ETH and so you are leaving some ETH on the table. Not such a good deal after all…
Those who have been involved with stock market trading might be familiar with indivisibility. You cannot ordinarily own a fraction of a stock. This indivisibility in infamously used by Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway to preclude investors who cannot find a spare $426,189 USD (at the time of writing) down the back of the couch to get into their exclusive class A stock. Oof…
Imagine if Bitcoin was indivisible — you would have to pay over $60k USD to get started! Would it be even more valuable if there were exactly 21 million positions at the table?
Some argue that those who come from a stock background are scared off by Bitcoin’s high valuation because they either believe Bitcoin is indivisible or they want a nice whole round number of coins. There is “utility” in a large supply of tokens and small value — namely that people feel psychologically better about owning a large number of coins. Some also dream that if one day their token or coin can get to $1 they will be rich with their large current-day holdings (ignoring the fact that their coin/token would need to have a market cap larger than the entire world’s wealth…)
What are the pros and cons of indivisibility?
Pros
It’s nice, it’s different, it’s unusual.
It looks more like an arcade token.
Cons
Lack of flexibility — The minimum entry price would be 1 TANKS token, and we wouldn’t be able to support fractions of winnings.
Billion dollar problem — If (or is it when…) the market cap is around a billion , the price of TANKS will start to approach $1 and beyond, which now starts to affect the accessibility of the game. Worth noting that the largest players in the crypto gaming space have market capitalization in the multiple billions, so this isn’t a theoretical concern. Add in deflationary buy-and-burn to the mix and the problem manifests earlier!
Leaving money on the table — Every transaction which otherwise would have purchased 0.9 fraction of a TANK can’t do it. That money isn’t going into the TANKS market cap because it can’t.
Indivisible TANKS — What are the alternatives?
Why not just increase the supply?
To keep TANKS indivisible, the initial supply of TANKS would have to go up significantly — perhaps to the trillions if not more. This doesn’t solve the above mentioned issues, just kicks the can and accepts that the combined burn + market capitalisation may never hit the dizzying heights where it becomes a problem again.
Perception wise it would start to make the TANKS token look worse in terms of cost per TANKS token AND it’s supply would match all the other meme and scam tokens/coins out there. If we wanted to keep the billion divisible TANKS — we’d be left with a billion dollar problem.
Could it be a problem to solved down the line — are there any technical solutions?
It wold be possible to redeploy the TANKS token in the future as a new token with either a higher supply OR with decimal precision. It would be messy, costly and dangerous. Worse still, we know of the issues now and could have changed it when the cost was practically zero instead of waiting until it was a problem will real world consequences.
TANK tokens should be divisible from the start
Here is what we are going to do.
When the TANKS token is minted — it will have 18 decimals. Why 18? Because that’s the “standard” number of decimals for an ERC-20 token.
For the initial token distribution — we’ll be generous and round up to the nearest decimal. You won’t be in a worse position from this change and it will be barely noticed from the balance sheet. Win-win.
