7 ms·

Is the DAO going to be DOA?

88 points by Osiris30 10y ago

sethbannon 10y ago
He writes: "It was because of these articles that Vitalik Buterin, one of the founders of The DAO, started exploring the concepts in a three part series." Vitalik is in no way a founder of The DAO. He's a "curator" which only means he can whitelist wallet addresses that can receive funds. He had no hand in it's creation or in the white paper that inspired it. Getting such a basic fact wrong makes me doubt his understanding in general.
- dmix 10y ago
  I wouldn't be so quick to judge. Most of this Ethereum stuff even confuses me half the time and I've been following BTC closely for a long time now. I'm not surprised the journo mixed up him being a co-founder of Ethereum, which underpins the tech behind DAO, and being a co-founder of The DAO. Off-topic: This type of nerd superiority complex comes up in every article written for a non-technical audience on a tech subject. Can't we ever just point out the error and move on, without turning it into an attack? It'd do a lot to improve the civility around here.
songzme 10y ago
This is the first time I've read content on Steem, and out of curiosity I went to check out the site. Its a pretty impressive alternative to reddit. Here's the whitepaper: https://steem.io/SteemWhitePaper.pdf https://steem.io/SteemWhitePaper.pdf
cjbprime 10y ago
> With an initial quorum of 20% it will be very challenging to get enough agreement, especially with the downsides associated with actually voting. 20% of tokens are held by the top 12 account holders. Getting 12 people (perhaps fewer, if someone had multiple wallets) who each invested millions of dollars into the DAO to vote doesn't seem that hard.
- hackcasual 10y ago
  The DAO represents about 13% of all Ethereum in existence. Considering over 75% of Ethereum was part of a premine crowd sale for a price between 2,000 - 1,337 BTC per ETH it's a reasonable assumption that the DAO was mostly founded with severely discounted ETH, and doesn't really represent +100M USD investment.
  - cjbprime 10y ago
    Anyone could have sold their ETH at around USD $8 per 1 ETH just prior to joining the Dao. I don't think "it's not real money" applies.
    - JoachimSchipper 10y ago
      Anyone could have sold 1 ETH for 8 USD, maybe, but that is very different from selling all ETH in a large account.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - hackcasual 10y ago
      Do you think they could have raised ~150 million USD by selling 12% of the existing ETH? I suspect $150 million couldn't be raised by selling all the ETH. It's disingenuous to take the current ETH-USD conversion rate based on a relatively low trading volume and imply that's what the DAO is worth, especially when so much ETH was bought so cheaply.
- amscanne 10y ago
  Presumably those who have invested millions are going to be even more aware of the downsides to voting (losing the ability to split) than most.
- darawk 10y ago
  It's likely that at least some of those large holders are exchanges like Poloniex that allow you to purchase DAO tokens directly on the exchange.
Animats 10y ago
He makes three key points: 1. Funding a startup makes the value of Etherium go down. So holders have an incentive not to fund anything. This would be less of a problem if Etherium was bigger. The currency you're using needs to be much bigger than the biggest individual transactions, or the money system stresses out. 2. "The DAO is just a committee of non-professional voters who have relatively little ability to do proper due diligence." 3. All this complexity solves a non-problem. VCs seldom take the money and run. The things they fund sometimes do, but not the people who put the fund together. On the other hand, taking the money and running is close to standard operating procedure in the crypto-currency world.
- drcode 10y ago
  1. Well, it's a bit more complex- DAO investors give up direct ownership in ether when they participate in the DAO in exchange for DAO Tokens. You're right that there could be some maligned incentives, but they fall on both sides of the ether valuation to a certain degree. 2. While the non-professional voters have little ability to do proper diligence, they DO have a mechanism for hiring outside parties to do diligence. 3. What complexity? Here's the source code, it's pretty darn simple: (https://github.com/slockit/DAO/blob/master/DAO.sol https://github.com/slockit/DAO/blob/master/DAO.sol) Also, I think the DAO solves two problems: First of all, VCs and VC lawyers and Hedge funds have enormous secondary costs that the DAO avoids entirely. Secondly, VCs and fund managers also have enormously maligned incentives which may affect their performance. (Note: I am still a skeptic of the DAO and did not participate in the experiment)
  - pablovidal85 10y ago
    So how come you ended up not participating? What are the downsides of this experiment?
    - drcode 10y ago
      1. reading the source code, I'm not convinced that it is entirely safe from various soft attacks large shareholders can take to influence the agenda of the fund. (This is hard to predict though... I don't see any full-on bugs, it's more an issue of shortcuts taken in the code for efficiency reasons that may or may not cause problems) 2. Many people are locking all their eth holdings at the same time in this fund- This will prevent them from acting on eth price fluctuations that I might possibly wish to exploit- I want to leave my options open. 3. The idea of creating a company that makes executive decisions by direct democracy is untested and may simply be nonviable. 4. There's some hairy legal issues that could cause liability for shareholders, and I'd rather not have that anxiety in my life.
andrewfromx 10y ago
here's a typical deleware court lawsuit http://courts.state.de.us/opinions/download.aspx?ID=207080 http://courts.state.de.us/opinions/download.aspx?ID=207080 skim thru that and now imagine that same disagreement over a DAO company vs. deleware court. Power players need to learn all sorts of different rules.
- nekopa 10y ago
  I read through the whole thing, and honestly, that whole thing seemed really straightforward. What would you see the issue as?
  - andrewfromx 10y ago
    I guess I'm a DAO novice, but when I heard about an org with 150 million and it's NOT a deleware company, I wonder how the power dynamic changes when things go wrong. The company in that pdf had a huge disagreement over who was running that company. Board members were forced out. New CEO placed in. In DOA what takes the place of the deleware court when there is this type of fight?
    - DennisP 10y ago
      For TheDAO itself, there's no possibility of such a dispute or resolution. There's a little bit of code that runs everything, and what it does can't be overridden. With this particular code, you get a vote in proportion to how many shares you own. The companies employed by TheDAO will resolve things like any other company.
      - andrewfromx 10y ago
        this explains it well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11787475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11787475
joosters 10y ago
I'm still pretty sure that the thing will be hacked before long, or will have critical bugs that will necessitate complex negotiations to fix. It's not just the size of the code that is the problem, although that alone practically guarantees that there will be bugs. Ethereum has a couple of unique properties that can cause all sorts of chaos in ways that 'normal' language developers never need worry about. First of all, code requires 'gas' to run. If there isn't enough gas, then the execution stops. But critically, some but not all of the code's actions are rolled back. Transfers from one party to another still take place. You can imagine a situation where an attacker runs a contract with just enough gas to make the code transfer some money but halt before it records the payout, allowing the withdrawal to be repeated. Secondly, there's a stack limit for code, again triggering an exception and a partial rollback. Developers are used to having to reason about stack overflows in normal programming situations, e.g. a recursive algorithm. But Ethereum's stack has more problems. It allows attackers to control the available stack space before your code gets run. e.g. an evil-doer could use up almost all of the stack, then call your contract. If the stack runs out at a select inopportune moment, there is potential for abuse.
- chejazi 10y ago
  > But critically, some but not all of the code's actions are rolled back. This is not true - the actions within the contract are rolled back. You do, however, lose the ether committed to paying the gas cost (cost of execution).
  - joosters 10y ago
    https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Subtleties https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Subtleties says: If a transaction triggers an exception, then: * The value transfer from sender to recipient still takes place * The fee transfer from sender to miner still takes place * The entire STARTGAS is added to gas_used * All other execution is reverted Perhaps I am reading that wrong, the 'value transfer' is unclear now that you mention the gas cost. I read it as talking about actual transfers. Can anyone confirm?
    - 10y ago
jackgavigan 10y ago
Even if TheDAO "fails", we'll have learnt something very important. We'll have found a DAO configuration that doesn't work. That knowledge will mean that future DAOs will have a higher chance of "succeeding".
- cal5k 10y ago
  You're making the critically flawed assumption that the space of all DAOs is a finite set!
  - jackgavigan 10y ago
    Elucidate.
bakhy 10y ago
Forgive me, but the website of DAO reminds me a bit of this one -> http://zombo.com/ http://zombo.com/ :)
- drcode 10y ago
  I know ethereum and "The DAO" sounds like a ton of mumbo-jumbo, but I assure you at its heart everything is actually very straight forward- For instance, the DAO is mainly just this small piece of computer code that is very readable: https://github.com/slockit/DAO/blob/master/DAO.sol https://github.com/slockit/DAO/blob/master/DAO.sol (Whether the DAO is good idea though is another matter entirely)
deleted 10y ago
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StevePerkins 10y ago
I'm surprised that this is posted to a (mostly) technical forum, and no one else assumed that it was talking about data access objects. TL;DR - It's really about Bitcoin-ish stuff
brianpgordon 10y ago
> Perhaps even more interesting with The DAO, once you vote for something you are no longer allowed to split your ETH out and form a new DAO. This means that you have much to lose by voting and much to gain by not voting. I'm not an expert on the DAO but I don't think this is correct. I think that voting on a proposal prevents you from splitting the DAO for a certain period of time, but not forever. Looking at various discussions happening around the web on this blog post, it's alarming how many people are disagreeing about this point. Even the author admits that he's not clear on it: > The DAO is complicated and I admit that I am not sure I fully understand how, when, and where ETH can be split relative to payouts and rewards. How exactly has this project accumulated over $100 million in funding, when there's no real understanding among the community about how the DAO actually works on a day-to-day basis? This telegraphs the sickly condition of the DAO investing community, in my opinion. People seem to have bought DAO tokens to speculate, not to vote. That's a problem for the DAO because the only way for it to take more ETH into the system is for projects to be profitable.
- cjbprime 10y ago
  You're right! It's just for the duration of the voting period (two weeks) of the proposal that you voted on, to avoid people being able to vote for a proposal without the outcome having any potential to affect them (because they split away). This massively undermines the OP's article criticism.
pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
so all the people working on bitcoin core are "autonomous?" you're an idiot, and so is your dad for not correcting you.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
I thought the application for DAOs was far broader than setting up VC type corporations. Another problem in general with blockchain technologies is that the power elite will eventually get around to trying to squash them. Anything that facilitates local businesses keeping value inside communities, businesses that don't give up value to the centralized monetary system, etc. will probably be targets.
craigvn 10y ago
DAO was dead as soon as ODBC entered the room.
Paul_S 10y ago
All this assumes that people who invested in DAO are random blokes off the street which they are demonstrably not. Have a little faith.
quinndupont 10y ago
Time will tell. While he makes some interesting points, I think he misses a core distinction on this point "BitShares had all of the tools, the talent, and the money... [and failed]." I had never heard of "BitShares" before, and I'm an active researcher in this area. The DAO made it to the front page of the New York Times, and not because of its amazing coding. Sometimes life is just a popularity contest, or nepotism (landing Buterin surely helped, since he is proving to be a masterful marketer). If the DAO succeeds where BitShares failed, it is probably due to completely _social_ reasons.
- jnbiche 10y ago
  > I had never heard of "BitShares" before, and I'm an active researcher in this area. How long have you been researching this area? I've never invested or participated in the project, but Bitshares or one of the other Larimer/Hoskins DAC projects/renames/reincarnations filled most of the top search results for "Distributed Autonomous Corporation" and "Distributed Autonomous Organization" for several years, up to this past year (indeed, I'm surprised that Ethereum's success has pushed out almost all trace of the project from the top search results). They promoted it pretty heavily, so you either are very new to the field or you didn't spend much time looking around for actual implementations of the technology. In fact, to the best of recollection, Larimer actually coined the phrase "distributed autonomous corporation". And Larimer and Bitshares are even featured prominently in the Wikipedia article on "Distributed Autonomous Corporations" (and it's not a new addition to the WP article). Here's an earlier piece from 2013 discussing DACs and Larimer by none other than Vitalik Buterin himself, back when he was a writer: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bootstrapping-a-decentralized-autonomous-corporation-part-i-1379644274 https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bootstrapping-a-decentr... Also, most of Larimer's criticisms in this piece address problems with The DAO's incentives. If the DAO gets those wrong, it won't matter how well it's marketed. That said, I do agree that these kinds of projects frequently fail or succeed for social, not technological, reasons (indeed, that's one of the main thrusts of the article).
  - quinndupont 10y ago
    Well, in my defense, I have not been actively looking for actual implementations (I'm an academic researcher), so I'll have to concede naivety. But, I think my point still stands, and I think we agree about the capricious nature of these things.
dmix 10y ago
> Who is right? Well odds are in favor of it being wasted as 9 in 10 startups fail. This commonly cited 90% startup failure rate is actually based on a 7yr timescale (if I'm not mistaken). I remember it being an example of a common misconception in the book "The Illusions of Entrepreneurship" [1]. Just because a small company eventually fails, it doesn't mean the investors didn't get any amount of ROI out of it. For example: It's possible a company makes 10's of millions in revenue but fails from cash flow issues after a long-term of being operational. So this isn't a good way to measure return potential when investing in companies. Unlike VC-style investments, not all businesses (even with $1 million capital) are billion dollar or nothing businesses. Not everything The DAO invests in has to be 100x return to be viable (unless they want to be VCs). So this changes the math quite a bit. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Illusions-Entrepreneurship-Costly-Entrepreneurs-Investors/dp/0300158564/r http://www.amazon.com/Illusions-Entrepreneurship-Costly-Entr...
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88 points by Osiris30 10y ago

He writes: "It was because of these articles that Vitalik Buterin, one of the founders of The DAO, started exploring the concepts in a three part series." Vitalik is in no way a founder of The DAO. He's a "curator" which only means he can whitelist wallet addresses that can receive funds. He had no hand in it's creation or in the white paper that inspired it. Getting such a basic fact wrong makes me doubt his understanding in general.

dmix 10y ago
I wouldn't be so quick to judge. Most of this Ethereum stuff even confuses me half the time and I've been following BTC closely for a long time now. I'm not surprised the journo mixed up him being a co-founder of Ethereum, which underpins the tech behind DAO, and being a co-founder of The DAO. Off-topic: This type of nerd superiority complex comes up in every article written for a non-technical audience on a tech subject. Can't we ever just point out the error and move on, without turning it into an attack? It'd do a lot to improve the civility around here.

songzme 10y ago

This is the first time I've read content on Steem, and out of curiosity I went to check out the site. Its a pretty impressive alternative to reddit. Here's the whitepaper: https://steem.io/SteemWhitePaper.pdf https://steem.io/SteemWhitePaper.pdf

cjbprime 10y ago

> With an initial quorum of 20% it will be very challenging to get enough agreement, especially with the downsides associated with actually voting. 20% of tokens are held by the top 12 account holders. Getting 12 people (perhaps fewer, if someone had multiple wallets) who each invested millions of dollars into the DAO to vote doesn't seem that hard.

hackcasual 10y ago
The DAO represents about 13% of all Ethereum in existence. Considering over 75% of Ethereum was part of a premine crowd sale for a price between 2,000 - 1,337 BTC per ETH it's a reasonable assumption that the DAO was mostly founded with severely discounted ETH, and doesn't really represent +100M USD investment.
- cjbprime 10y ago
  Anyone could have sold their ETH at around USD $8 per 1 ETH just prior to joining the Dao. I don't think "it's not real money" applies.
  - JoachimSchipper 10y ago
    Anyone could have sold 1 ETH for 8 USD, maybe, but that is very different from selling all ETH in a large account.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - hackcasual 10y ago
    Do you think they could have raised ~150 million USD by selling 12% of the existing ETH? I suspect $150 million couldn't be raised by selling all the ETH. It's disingenuous to take the current ETH-USD conversion rate based on a relatively low trading volume and imply that's what the DAO is worth, especially when so much ETH was bought so cheaply.
amscanne 10y ago
Presumably those who have invested millions are going to be even more aware of the downsides to voting (losing the ability to split) than most.
darawk 10y ago
It's likely that at least some of those large holders are exchanges like Poloniex that allow you to purchase DAO tokens directly on the exchange.

Animats 10y ago

He makes three key points: 1. Funding a startup makes the value of Etherium go down. So holders have an incentive not to fund anything. This would be less of a problem if Etherium was bigger. The currency you're using needs to be much bigger than the biggest individual transactions, or the money system stresses out. 2. "The DAO is just a committee of non-professional voters who have relatively little ability to do proper due diligence." 3. All this complexity solves a non-problem. VCs seldom take the money and run. The things they fund sometimes do, but not the people who put the fund together. On the other hand, taking the money and running is close to standard operating procedure in the crypto-currency world.

drcode 10y ago
1. Well, it's a bit more complex- DAO investors give up direct ownership in ether when they participate in the DAO in exchange for DAO Tokens. You're right that there could be some maligned incentives, but they fall on both sides of the ether valuation to a certain degree. 2. While the non-professional voters have little ability to do proper diligence, they DO have a mechanism for hiring outside parties to do diligence. 3. What complexity? Here's the source code, it's pretty darn simple: (https://github.com/slockit/DAO/blob/master/DAO.sol https://github.com/slockit/DAO/blob/master/DAO.sol) Also, I think the DAO solves two problems: First of all, VCs and VC lawyers and Hedge funds have enormous secondary costs that the DAO avoids entirely. Secondly, VCs and fund managers also have enormously maligned incentives which may affect their performance. (Note: I am still a skeptic of the DAO and did not participate in the experiment)
- pablovidal85 10y ago
  So how come you ended up not participating? What are the downsides of this experiment?
  - drcode 10y ago
    1. reading the source code, I'm not convinced that it is entirely safe from various soft attacks large shareholders can take to influence the agenda of the fund. (This is hard to predict though... I don't see any full-on bugs, it's more an issue of shortcuts taken in the code for efficiency reasons that may or may not cause problems) 2. Many people are locking all their eth holdings at the same time in this fund- This will prevent them from acting on eth price fluctuations that I might possibly wish to exploit- I want to leave my options open. 3. The idea of creating a company that makes executive decisions by direct democracy is untested and may simply be nonviable. 4. There's some hairy legal issues that could cause liability for shareholders, and I'd rather not have that anxiety in my life.

andrewfromx 10y ago

here's a typical deleware court lawsuit http://courts.state.de.us/opinions/download.aspx?ID=207080 http://courts.state.de.us/opinions/download.aspx?ID=207080 skim thru that and now imagine that same disagreement over a DAO company vs. deleware court. Power players need to learn all sorts of different rules.

nekopa 10y ago
I read through the whole thing, and honestly, that whole thing seemed really straightforward. What would you see the issue as?
- andrewfromx 10y ago
  I guess I'm a DAO novice, but when I heard about an org with 150 million and it's NOT a deleware company, I wonder how the power dynamic changes when things go wrong. The company in that pdf had a huge disagreement over who was running that company. Board members were forced out. New CEO placed in. In DOA what takes the place of the deleware court when there is this type of fight?
  - DennisP 10y ago
    For TheDAO itself, there's no possibility of such a dispute or resolution. There's a little bit of code that runs everything, and what it does can't be overridden. With this particular code, you get a vote in proportion to how many shares you own. The companies employed by TheDAO will resolve things like any other company.
    - andrewfromx 10y ago
      this explains it well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11787475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11787475

joosters 10y ago

I'm still pretty sure that the thing will be hacked before long, or will have critical bugs that will necessitate complex negotiations to fix. It's not just the size of the code that is the problem, although that alone practically guarantees that there will be bugs. Ethereum has a couple of unique properties that can cause all sorts of chaos in ways that 'normal' language developers never need worry about. First of all, code requires 'gas' to run. If there isn't enough gas, then the execution stops. But critically, some but not all of the code's actions are rolled back. Transfers from one party to another still take place. You can imagine a situation where an attacker runs a contract with just enough gas to make the code transfer some money but halt before it records the payout, allowing the withdrawal to be repeated. Secondly, there's a stack limit for code, again triggering an exception and a partial rollback. Developers are used to having to reason about stack overflows in normal programming situations, e.g. a recursive algorithm. But Ethereum's stack has more problems. It allows attackers to control the available stack space before your code gets run. e.g. an evil-doer could use up almost all of the stack, then call your contract. If the stack runs out at a select inopportune moment, there is potential for abuse.

chejazi 10y ago
> But critically, some but not all of the code's actions are rolled back. This is not true - the actions within the contract are rolled back. You do, however, lose the ether committed to paying the gas cost (cost of execution).
- joosters 10y ago
  https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Subtleties https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Subtleties says: If a transaction triggers an exception, then: * The value transfer from sender to recipient still takes place * The fee transfer from sender to miner still takes place * The entire STARTGAS is added to gas_used * All other execution is reverted Perhaps I am reading that wrong, the 'value transfer' is unclear now that you mention the gas cost. I read it as talking about actual transfers. Can anyone confirm?
  - 10y ago

jackgavigan 10y ago

Even if TheDAO "fails", we'll have learnt something very important. We'll have found a DAO configuration that doesn't work. That knowledge will mean that future DAOs will have a higher chance of "succeeding".

cal5k 10y ago
You're making the critically flawed assumption that the space of all DAOs is a finite set!
- jackgavigan 10y ago
  Elucidate.

bakhy 10y ago

Forgive me, but the website of DAO reminds me a bit of this one -> http://zombo.com/ http://zombo.com/ :)

drcode 10y ago
I know ethereum and "The DAO" sounds like a ton of mumbo-jumbo, but I assure you at its heart everything is actually very straight forward- For instance, the DAO is mainly just this small piece of computer code that is very readable: https://github.com/slockit/DAO/blob/master/DAO.sol https://github.com/slockit/DAO/blob/master/DAO.sol (Whether the DAO is good idea though is another matter entirely)

deleted 10y ago

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StevePerkins 10y ago

I'm surprised that this is posted to a (mostly) technical forum, and no one else assumed that it was talking about data access objects. TL;DR - It's really about Bitcoin-ish stuff

brianpgordon 10y ago

> Perhaps even more interesting with The DAO, once you vote for something you are no longer allowed to split your ETH out and form a new DAO. This means that you have much to lose by voting and much to gain by not voting. I'm not an expert on the DAO but I don't think this is correct. I think that voting on a proposal prevents you from splitting the DAO for a certain period of time, but not forever. Looking at various discussions happening around the web on this blog post, it's alarming how many people are disagreeing about this point. Even the author admits that he's not clear on it: > The DAO is complicated and I admit that I am not sure I fully understand how, when, and where ETH can be split relative to payouts and rewards. How exactly has this project accumulated over $100 million in funding, when there's no real understanding among the community about how the DAO actually works on a day-to-day basis? This telegraphs the sickly condition of the DAO investing community, in my opinion. People seem to have bought DAO tokens to speculate, not to vote. That's a problem for the DAO because the only way for it to take more ETH into the system is for projects to be profitable.

cjbprime 10y ago
You're right! It's just for the duration of the voting period (two weeks) of the proposal that you voted on, to avoid people being able to vote for a proposal without the outcome having any potential to affect them (because they split away). This massively undermines the OP's article criticism.

pg_is_a_butt 10y ago

so all the people working on bitcoin core are "autonomous?" you're an idiot, and so is your dad for not correcting you.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

I thought the application for DAOs was far broader than setting up VC type corporations. Another problem in general with blockchain technologies is that the power elite will eventually get around to trying to squash them. Anything that facilitates local businesses keeping value inside communities, businesses that don't give up value to the centralized monetary system, etc. will probably be targets.

craigvn 10y ago

DAO was dead as soon as ODBC entered the room.

Paul_S 10y ago

All this assumes that people who invested in DAO are random blokes off the street which they are demonstrably not. Have a little faith.

quinndupont 10y ago

Time will tell. While he makes some interesting points, I think he misses a core distinction on this point "BitShares had all of the tools, the talent, and the money... [and failed]." I had never heard of "BitShares" before, and I'm an active researcher in this area. The DAO made it to the front page of the New York Times, and not because of its amazing coding. Sometimes life is just a popularity contest, or nepotism (landing Buterin surely helped, since he is proving to be a masterful marketer). If the DAO succeeds where BitShares failed, it is probably due to completely _social_ reasons.

jnbiche 10y ago
> I had never heard of "BitShares" before, and I'm an active researcher in this area. How long have you been researching this area? I've never invested or participated in the project, but Bitshares or one of the other Larimer/Hoskins DAC projects/renames/reincarnations filled most of the top search results for "Distributed Autonomous Corporation" and "Distributed Autonomous Organization" for several years, up to this past year (indeed, I'm surprised that Ethereum's success has pushed out almost all trace of the project from the top search results). They promoted it pretty heavily, so you either are very new to the field or you didn't spend much time looking around for actual implementations of the technology. In fact, to the best of recollection, Larimer actually coined the phrase "distributed autonomous corporation". And Larimer and Bitshares are even featured prominently in the Wikipedia article on "Distributed Autonomous Corporations" (and it's not a new addition to the WP article). Here's an earlier piece from 2013 discussing DACs and Larimer by none other than Vitalik Buterin himself, back when he was a writer: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bootstrapping-a-decentralized-autonomous-corporation-part-i-1379644274 https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bootstrapping-a-decentr... Also, most of Larimer's criticisms in this piece address problems with The DAO's incentives. If the DAO gets those wrong, it won't matter how well it's marketed. That said, I do agree that these kinds of projects frequently fail or succeed for social, not technological, reasons (indeed, that's one of the main thrusts of the article).
- quinndupont 10y ago
  Well, in my defense, I have not been actively looking for actual implementations (I'm an academic researcher), so I'll have to concede naivety. But, I think my point still stands, and I think we agree about the capricious nature of these things.

dmix 10y ago

> Who is right? Well odds are in favor of it being wasted as 9 in 10 startups fail. This commonly cited 90% startup failure rate is actually based on a 7yr timescale (if I'm not mistaken). I remember it being an example of a common misconception in the book "The Illusions of Entrepreneurship" [1]. Just because a small company eventually fails, it doesn't mean the investors didn't get any amount of ROI out of it. For example: It's possible a company makes 10's of millions in revenue but fails from cash flow issues after a long-term of being operational. So this isn't a good way to measure return potential when investing in companies. Unlike VC-style investments, not all businesses (even with $1 million capital) are billion dollar or nothing businesses. Not everything The DAO invests in has to be 100x return to be viable (unless they want to be VCs). So this changes the math quite a bit. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Illusions-Entrepreneurship-Costly-Entrepreneurs-Investors/dp/0300158564/r http://www.amazon.com/Illusions-Entrepreneurship-Costly-Entr...

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