> 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 par

> 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).