4 ms·

There's a reason corporations developed as they did. With a large number of owners, it becomes very difficult to tell what is actually going on in a company and

by c3534l 10y ago

There's a reason corporations developed as they did. With a large number of owners, it becomes very difficult to tell what is actually going on in a company and making consistent, sensical decisions is difficult. The result is that we developed a board of directors who are elected by the owners to oversee the performance of the top employees at that company, and a complex of system of accounting to communicate the financial position of the company directly to investors. I don't see how this project addresses the two main problems that corporations attempt to solve: a lack of complete information about a company of reasonable size, and a coordinating a large number of people who may not want to devote a full-time job to overseeing the company. I would be much more impressed if they described this as an open-source investment algorithm or something like. Instead, it seems as if they're trying to sell us on the benefits of a corporation to people who think "corporation" means "big, evil company."

drcode 10y ago
> There's a reason corporations developed as they did. Well, the counterargument would be "Because they didn't have computers back then and therefore couldn't develop alternative systems that are better but are impractical to implement manually."
- c3534l 10y ago
  Sure, but I don't see how this actually addresses the problems that corporations solve.
  - drcode 10y ago
    I agree that question doesn't have a good answer yet, and is why I am not participating in this experiment.
natosaichek 10y ago
So I might be reading into it too much, but it seems to me that part 1 (a lack of complete information about a company of reasonable size) Is basically totally solved by this system. The assets are completely documented on a massive publicly distributed system. The procedures for making decisions are similarly well documented. Basically everything you'd want to know about the [entity] is totally freely available. It's not hard to write some frontend to query all the data from the blockchain and keep an up-to-the minute accurate accounting of the resources of the [entity] Now the second part I can't vouch for - coordinating a large number of people is hard. But the code for the system is available for inspection. If someone thinks they can come up with a way to align incentives and such so that people cooperate better in the system (quadratic instead of linear voting? vote delegation? temporary dictatorships?) then (I think?) they can submit those as amendments to the system and improve it. I'm really guessing here as I haven't looked into it in that much detail.
- c3534l 10y ago
  It's not just that the visibility of the assets, it's not knowing that your employees are tired or angry or thinking about leaving; it's not knowing what tone of voice your customers have when they return a product; it's basically everything unpredictable without someone being there to individually assess an unpredictable situation and make a decision. There are already some domains which are highly automated - finance comes to mind. But you still have someone ultimately in charge to oversee it. If the sales pitch is that this is some kind of open-source trading algorithm where investors get to vote on code, that's neat, but I don't see what's so special about calling them tokens instead of stock or how this will lead to automated corporations (or how this is not a corporation for that matter). Actually, now that I think about it, if this thing isn't going to be registered as a corporation, who will be held responsible for it's finances?

by c3534l 10y ago

drcode 10y ago

> There's a reason corporations developed as they did. Well, the counterargument would be "Because they didn't have computers back then and therefore couldn't develop alternative systems that are better but are impractical to implement manually."

c3534l 10y ago
Sure, but I don't see how this actually addresses the problems that corporations solve.
- drcode 10y ago
  I agree that question doesn't have a good answer yet, and is why I am not participating in this experiment.

natosaichek 10y ago

So I might be reading into it too much, but it seems to me that part 1 (a lack of complete information about a company of reasonable size) Is basically totally solved by this system. The assets are completely documented on a massive publicly distributed system. The procedures for making decisions are similarly well documented. Basically everything you'd want to know about the [entity] is totally freely available. It's not hard to write some frontend to query all the data from the blockchain and keep an up-to-the minute accurate accounting of the resources of the [entity] Now the second part I can't vouch for - coordinating a large number of people is hard. But the code for the system is available for inspection. If someone thinks they can come up with a way to align incentives and such so that people cooperate better in the system (quadratic instead of linear voting? vote delegation? temporary dictatorships?) then (I think?) they can submit those as amendments to the system and improve it. I'm really guessing here as I haven't looked into it in that much detail.

c3534l 10y ago
It's not just that the visibility of the assets, it's not knowing that your employees are tired or angry or thinking about leaving; it's not knowing what tone of voice your customers have when they return a product; it's basically everything unpredictable without someone being there to individually assess an unpredictable situation and make a decision. There are already some domains which are highly automated - finance comes to mind. But you still have someone ultimately in charge to oversee it. If the sales pitch is that this is some kind of open-source trading algorithm where investors get to vote on code, that's neat, but I don't see what's so special about calling them tokens instead of stock or how this will lead to automated corporations (or how this is not a corporation for that matter). Actually, now that I think about it, if this thing isn't going to be registered as a corporation, who will be held responsible for it's finances?