Like, the whole point of a public traded company is that anyone can come in and give money to the company and, in turn, they get money when the company is doing well, so the money you’ve paid is, hopefully, not lost.
I don’t know about you, but on paper, that sounds like bonds and basically every type of debt in existence.
The difference is the perpetual ownership of the company by shareholders. Consider someone who lent a company 20k, they now have an asset that grew immensely in value, it gives them money quarterly/yearly/whatever, AND they have decision power on the company, despite the fact that they have earned 100x what they lent.
Just changing the idea of stock to be something with an expiration date would remove most of the weirdness of the system, but at that point it isn’t really a public-traded company, is it?