Regular buyers = their intention is to become users of the domains they buy, explicitly not sellers
More buying = more liquidity
More selling does not mean more liquidity. Liquidity is explicitly only about making selling easier. Those who put up domains for sale are doing absolutely nothing to increase liquidity. Also, why do you think domain liquidity is a good thing? Beyond a certain point, more liquidity offers people essentially nothing. If you can sell a domain within a year, why the need for it to be faster? Unless you'll go bankrupt without the sale of your domain in the next week, liquidity is really a worthless goal in the realm of domains.
Even a single domain being held without being used is evidence. You can find literally hundreds of thousands of examples to add to your overflowing barrel of evidence. The exploits of Kevin Hamm and his like are very well documented. It seems we disagree on whether there is evidence it is a problem, because we don't agree on what the problem is. So I ask you: is there any other value besides liquidity (which I've shown above isn't provided by hoarders) that domain squatters bring to the market? If not, they should be squashed if at all possible (without causing other problems in the system)."any evidence to support that claim"
The basic criteria for a domain being "used" is that the value the buyer expects to get from the domain be based on something other than proceeds from resale. Is that an explicit enough definition?How would you determine if they are "using it" anyway?
I consider all these cases to be using the domain rather than "domain squatting", because the value they intend to get from the domain is not from resale."only using email or something else on that domain ... What if I'm holding the domain for a child of mine to use in a few years? What about companies who commonly use defensive registrations to protect their brands and IP from confusingly similar names? What about companies that register names well in advance of yet-to-be-released products so it'll still be available when their product dev is ready? "
I'm in no way arguing that some kind of central OR distributed authority should be able take away your domain because they believe you aren't "using it". What I am saying is that the most common ways domain squatting is done today A. provides negative value to the marketplace, and B. can be mitigated pretty easily without harming all the "edge cases" you were mentioning and without anyone having to decide whether someone is "using it" or not.What gives you the right to say that I'm not using a domain name just because you don't know all of the facts?
: )I totally understand the passion