I don't think the objection you're actually making is valid (the extra atomic reference is just a representation of the fact that the local refcount is nonzero)

I don't think the objection you're actually making is valid (the extra atomic reference is just a representation of the fact that the local refcount is nonzero), but come to think of it, even in the original version, how the heck does a thread know whether a reference held by (say) a dictionary that is itself accesible to multiple threads was increfed by the owning thread or another thread?