3 ms·

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

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.
fapjacks 10y ago
"Sometimes"... The older I get, the more I realize that everything comes down to a popularity contest. The only thing that doesn't abide by that law is physics and warfare. And warfare is a lot of physics.

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.

fapjacks 10y ago

"Sometimes"... The older I get, the more I realize that everything comes down to a popularity contest. The only thing that doesn't abide by that law is physics and warfare. And warfare is a lot of physics.