Not too long ago I had a conversation with dami and others in the discord about clearing the b00n debt. Lots of ideas got tossed around, like a store to purchase items from that funnels back to the omnibus (which I'd still love to see!), but I wanted to share my results from analyzing the data.

At current, if we considered fully draining inactive accounts, it wouldn't be enough to clear the debt, but we could make a solid dent in it.

10+ year inactive users account for about 70k b00ns.
5+ year inactive users account for about 184k b00ns.
2+ year inactive users account for about 320k b00ns.
1+ year inactive users account for about 366k b00ns.

At present, the central omnibus is about 500k b00ns in debt. While none of these options are enough to clear the debt on its own-- and we definitely shouldn't be draining 1+ or 2+ years inactive accounts-- the 5+ year option would let us make a sizable dent in the current debt, which hasn't moved much from the last few years (the peaks are about equal, and 2026 is on track to be the same from 2025 and 2024).

Here's the spreadsheet, for the curious. It has some further stuff about additional one-time site-wide taxes for clearing the debt.

boon debt is fine imo! more than fine. like the total opposite of just sitting on top of a big pile of money. so it sounds more good than bad to me. like a promise made from the present to the future that we'll make it good

if there's gotta be a boon tax change, mb hard clip at 5k boons? 2k boons? and just pass these boons out to everyone equal

why is it good to have no debt?

the us has immense debt and look how great everything is going there!

how does b00n debt even work...???

The central omnibus bank of botb is a real account on the site, just called “BotB”. Unlike every other account on the site, it’s allowed to go into negative boons. When the site header says things like “BotB gave you 5 boons”, that’s where it is coming from, from a literal botb account. The site does not create boons out of thin air.

The bank had a starting balance of around a million boons starting out, and it has trended downwards every year since. It hit zero around 2018, and a change in 2020 (seemingly to enable the negative boons) retroactively plunged the bank into deep debt. Since then, we have had tax days. If we make the bank solvent (by getting it above 0 boons), we won’t have tax days.

tax % goes up every year. it would be good to know how many years (with around the same boon spending each year) it would take for taxes + stealing from inactive accounts to get us out of the tax zone

most likely a very long time. what's the exchange rate for boons to, say, USD?

if we must pay off the bank we can do it faster and better if we unleash the full strength of the taxman where it counts! I got like less than an hour to bang this out bc Fluffy-BotB has a non-botb birsthday coming in fast so it'll be kinda bracketed instead of like a smooth exponent logarithm kinda deal that'll be safer from the tax dodgers. but I gotta go fast here

may everyone's first 1350 boons be safe from the taxman! all boons AFTER these first 1350 get the tax

it takes 1323 boons to host a full 4HB. around 25 boons for avatar. these first few boons are the only ones really moving thru the economy and doing anything

easing the 2k hard clip to just having all boons after anyone's first 2200 get 90% tax will totally feed the bank fast. 2200 leaves room for that full deluxe 4HB, a good old classic OHB, an avatar, a palette, a playlist, and the funds to author an article in the lyceum

and ofc boons 1351 to 2200 get the classic year-by-year tax

after the botb bank gets payed off; may all the surplus get split completely evenly and sent to all botbrs! no distinction made between anyone. equal for all botbrs. even the mummis

i think we should just not do anything and wait for the banks boon count to underflow to whatever the maximum is for decimal numbers. itll happen soon trust . /hj

i am fairly sure the bank was in debt well before 2020, it went in debt somewhere around 2017, boons did indeed go negative even back then. i think where you got 2020 from was from the stats, but those did not report negative boons, presumably because there was no way for the stats to record negative values? but it was well in debt from some point in 2017 onwards, accumulating i think almost 900k boons in debt before taxes started being taken

taxes started being collected since 2019, thread here: https://battleofthebits.com/academy/GroupThread/20512/

i also think that it might be fair to limit boons or take them from inactive accts or whatnot, but at that point you might as well replace the whole system with something less fun and unique, and i think the fact that botb has a bank thats in debt from paying lots of people is really fun(ny).

https://battleofthebits.com/daily_stats/#boons

I'm learning a lot about botb today.

I am in favor of paying off the debt because debt stresses me out. But my goofball side wants to raise a Tea Party equivalent in botb--you know, crazy nonsense ideas about taxes.

Or maybe a Sovereign Citizen take in things.

the only argument that debt is bad in this thread is "if it was eliminated we wouldn't have tax days." - the thing is, tax is good, similar to when inflation is functioning correctly, it promotes spending. So if we eliminate this negative number that has no effect on anyone we can make the boon economy more stagnant...?

we're calling it boon debt but debt means money you owe someone. who does the bank owe? its not even debt its just a number

i appreciate the effort, but the bank having negative 500k boons is funnier

So if the BotB account goes more into debt, bad things happen like when you look on the BotB account there's a negative number and .... that's it.

Or am I not understanding something?

Or are we all just role playing that it's real money and I didn't catch on to the bit?

Even if it was real money, it's better to have taxes/inflation to promote spending like blower5 wrote. Hoarding money is a terrible thing for an economy, see liquidity trap

. In the world of BotB, that means less battles hosted, less entries, less activity, LESS FUN!

I mean primarily this was just a fun exercise in tossing numbers around, that and I just kinda took "debt is bad" as a given. Obv none of this is all that serious but I do think it'd be fun to pull the bank back into the green, for no other reason than we won't have to worry abt taxes

It's all fun and games till the b00n debt collectors start knocking on Puke's front door.
"WHERE'S THE B00Nz LEBOWSKI!"