I did ask it in the stupid questions thread. :)
I think that both can be true and yet still have real results. Take humans, reproduction, and marriage. Typically a man is fertile for more years than a woman. We see in marriage a tension between men staying loyal to the wife of their youth and moving on to a more fertile partner. I don't have statistics in front of me, but over history the tendency is to stay loyal. Patrimonialism has a profound evolutionary basis and my theory is that you can use that built in bias to form a sustainable system where legal entities have life spans instead of immortality. If the life span is too short, than it is useless.
As far as the fees go, Bitcoin's fees are non-zero but very close to zero and many alternate payment schemes can be constructed. Typical CC transactions are 3%...much higher than the about .05 needed for a BTC transaction. There are also ways to convince miners to mine your transactions even though no BTC Fees are provided.
I don't have statistics in front of me, but over history the tendency is to stay loyal.
If you look at how companies try to evade paying taxes, that's a bad assumptions. Companies usually try to whatever they can do to legally avoid paying taxes instead of paying more taxes then necessary out of loyalty to the government.
As far as your current setup seems to work, all the "pref" seems to go back to from N1 to N2 in cases of decay payed. The person who owns N2 can create a N3 and transfer all the money from N2 to N3. That way N2 never pays any ...
This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.
Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.
To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.