9 ms·

D(?)A(?)O – Decentralization and Autonomy in “DAOs”

56 points by bpierre 5y ago

nullc 5y ago
Missing the point. These things are supposed to exist for pure marketing blitz, it doesn't matter if they're actually decenteralized or even outright fraudulent. It just has to help bring in enough new suckers to allow the recipients of ethereum's huge pre-mine (now valued at about one quarter trillion dollars) to exit more of their positions without collapsing the price.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  No one person controls more than 1% of ETH supply. Satoshi still owns 1M BTC, or 5% of all BTC and it's said that the Winklevoss twins control about 1% of BTC supply.
  - nullc 5y ago
    We don't actually know much about who controls the eth supply. Their pre-mine recipients were mostly anonymous and with the fast majority going to a few addresses. For all you know they recycled received funds back out in their crowd sale and bought multiple times. Participation was limited because US residents-- by far the largest population of cryptocurrency users-- were prohibited from participating (though of course some did). [Edit: A comment below claims otherwise, I don't actually see support for that in my source, and my own correspondence from the time states that it wasn't. I'm not sure if something changed around the launch, or if I'm somehow mistaken.] I dunno anything about winklevoss speculation, people often include funds held in custody as if they're owned by the custodian and reach weird conclusions. It's easy to list ethereum accounts that hold >=1% of all ethereum: 0x281055afc982d96fab65b3a49cac8b878184cb16, 0x6f46cf5569aefa1acc1009290c8e043747172d89, 0x90e63c3d53e0ea496845b7a03ec7548b70014a91, 0x53d284357ec70ce289d6d64134dfac8e511c8a3d, 0xab7c74abc0c4d48d1bdad5dcb26153fc8780f83e, 0xfe9e8709d3215310075d67e3ed32a380ccf451c8; while the largest Bitcoin address is under 1%. (Of course, parties can have multiple addresses, and as mentioned some parties hold coins for many other people) Moreover, regardless of the distribution Bitcoin had no premine: Everyone who has Bitcoin received it in a open process available to the whole world with no particular privilege other than knowing and caring about it when it was almost worthless before other people did. (well, I suppose except for those people who stole theirs :)). We don't actually know how many Bitcoin Satoshi-- if he's still alive-- owns: there are guesses based on assuming various earlier miners might have been him, but they're guesses. The 1M claim specifically is flat out false: it comes from counting up every coin mined during the first year that was still on spent at the time the figure started circulating a few years ago. It includes many coins known to have been mined by other people, including likely myself.
    - DennisP 5y ago
      U.S. residents were not prohibited. Here's the official announcement saying so: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/22/launching-the-ether-sale/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/22/launching-the-ether-sal...
    - nocommentguy 5y ago
      Hi Greg, > For all you know they recycled received funds back out in their crowd sale and bought multiple times. Actually we know that they didn’t and so do you, because the funds didn’t leave the multisig until the sale ended
      - nullc 5y ago
        Turns out that money is fungible. The moment the crowdsale ended the CEO paid himself out a million dollars and left. ...
        knowaveragejoe 5y ago
        Do you have a source for this claim?
  - seigando 5y ago
    Wow. that puts him in the top 30 richest people on earth...according to https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#233e45c53d78 https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#233e45c53d78 which i randomly googled.
- anotha1 5y ago
  I hope your wrong, for the sake of all the folks that invested in this.
  - nocommentguy 5y ago
    Thank you for looking out for my financial well-being, internet stranger
- knowaveragejoe 5y ago
  Ethereum's pre-mine is worth more than half of ETH's market cap?
  - yaa_minu 5y ago
    Yes, 70% premine. Absolutely unethical
    - knowaveragejoe 5y ago
      How does one learn this information? Do you have a link?
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - DennisP 5y ago
        https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/22/launching-the-ether-sale/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/22/launching-the-ether-sal...
        nullc 5y ago
        "We are not blocking the US after all. Yay." I hope you can see why many people believed the US was prohibited.
        DennisP 5y ago
        Yes, if they weren't paying attention. There was serious concern that the Ethereum Foundation would get in trouble with the SEC if they sold in the US. They delayed the crowdsale for several months while they consulted lawyers, who finally signed off on a way to keep them out of SEC trouble. There was a lot of discussion about this in the community. The presale was open for 42 days and very well known in the crypto community. Within the first few days it was clear that it was going to be one of the largest crowdsales to date, so it got regular media attention too.
- nocommentguy 5y ago
  This user is Greg Maxwell, who works full-time on internet arguments on behalf of AXA ventures, the organization that deliberately crippled Bitcoin in an attempt to monetize sidechains. Since that failed, he has been relegated to simple FUD while his handlers accumulate ETH.
  - nullc 5y ago
    I've never spoken to anyone at AXA as far as I know, FWIW. Of course, the rest of your smearing is similarly nonsense.
- miohtama 5y ago
  I did a thread on the evolution of cryptocurrencies today. I cover the term “premine.” Your arguments do not make sense. https://mobile.twitter.com/moo9000/status/1389571466002325510 https://mobile.twitter.com/moo9000/status/138957146600232551...
seibelj 5y ago
If you want to see a graph about why many are so bullish on Ethereum - https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F110fd6e9-505a-4f91-b36c-cc1bf95f22be_1354x708.png https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p... Blockchain is like the early days of the internet, probably like 1998 right now. There were competitors to all the major internet protocols - TCP/IP, WWW, HTTP, but once everyone standardized the web flourished. I believe Ethereum is like that today. There are competitors, and loud internet commenters are financially incentivized to criticize it and promote others, but if you look at where organic development and new projects are founded on, Ethereum is far and away the most popular. Others are not even close. Other chains who criticize the fees of Ethereum are essentially saying, "That place is so crowded, nobody goes there anymore." ETH is working on scaling, bit by bit, and now with Layer-2 solutions like Optimism, Arbitrum, Matic/Polygon, zkSync, Immutable, etc. etc. it's finally allowing scale in a significant way even before ETH2 is launched and takes over. Many chains pay projects to port their dapps to their own chain just to get some sort of third-party development, while the Ethereum Foundation primarily funds fundamental research and protocol improvements - Ethereum doesn't need to pay people to build on their chain. If an alternative blockchain's only reason to exist is "Like Ethereum - but with lower fees!" I would be leery. Some chains like Monero exist with a very defined purpose (privacy), and I see Bitcoin as something else entirely (store of value). But as the one-chain-to-rule-them-all, Ethereum would be your best bet.
- knowaveragejoe 5y ago
  The graph is a few years out of date, fwiw.
  - seibelj 5y ago
    True - but as a longtime crypto pro the sentiment is still accurate IMO. See recent article https://decrypt.co/66740/who-are-the-fastest-growing-developer-communities-in-crypto https://decrypt.co/66740/who-are-the-fastest-growing-develop... > There are more than 8,000 monthly active developers working on various cryptocurrency projects, according to the Developer Report, produced by Electric Capital, a venture firm, with some 80% of those developers starting in the last two years. > The current leader in terms of people actively contributing to the development of a network is Ethereum, with approximately 2,300 average monthly developers - those who were active on a monthly basis, according to the Developer Report. The number actively working on Ethereum has grown by 215% in 3 years.
chrisco255 5y ago
This article is a good overview of DAOs but spends a lot of time on terminology and taxonomy, without necessarily painting a clear picture to someone not familiar with DAOs as to how they operate in the wild today and perhaps how they will in the future. I continue to believe that DAOs are one of the most disruptive technologies of the 21st century. The ability to coordinate humans and capital in a decentralized way is powerful and will be used for everything from for-profit initiatives to non-profit foundations. The pluggable, open-source nature of these systems means that DAO treasury management and governance will become more and more sophisticated with time. Eventually, many of us are going to end up taking jobs working for DAOs.
- anotha1 5y ago
  > most disruptive technologies of the 21st century. I couldn't agree more. Though, as far as this article goes, I was looking for more of a playbook than high-level market analysis.
- highfrequency 5y ago
  What is the argument? Why would we expect a version of Apple with decentralized governance to outperform the current Apple?
  - 21eleven 5y ago
    Because the governance structures of DAOs will be open source smart contracts they will be, in theory, easier to iterate upon and improve.
  - tedunangst 5y ago
    The DAO Apple would vote to make iPhones with replaceable batteries, which as we all know, is what the market actually wants.
  - casi18 5y ago
    It is an interesting question, but what would outperforming Apple look like? and on what timescale? Is it being more profitable? Having happier workers? Making the sleekest shiny things? And are we thinking for the next year or the next hundred years? Decentralized organisations seem (to me) to be prioritising resilience over efficiency. This seems like a long game. But perhaps shared ownership and pseudonymous employment will appeal to people. And perhaps sourcing workers anywhere in the world will lead to quick contacts building and fast deployment too. Or it could get caught up in bureaucracy, but then we can just fork the daos and vampire attack them! There is a lot a vague murkyness in national law as to who is responsible/where is tax payed/what is it, but the idea of being able to click a button and i have a borderless organisation with voting systems and memberships all ready to go to anyone who wants to join in is pretty exciting. Think of the crazy possibilities of collisions happening, people to meet, ideas to be generated. If we increase the speed at which people, ideas, and capital can come together that can be explosive (and that could be good or bad). We can have groups of strangers round the world seeding startups of anonymous teenagers writing code after school, before the university lecturers and vcs ever get to them. Thats radical and revolutionary. DAOs are the most exciting thing going in crypto imo.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
I lost a lot of faith in DAO and the whole code as contract when the proponents abandoned it as soon as they lost substantial money. When someone found a way to make a lot of money from the DAO contract, instead of congratulating them for using the letter of the contract to make money, the owners of the DAO suddenly started calling it theft and hacking and changed the protocol to make recover their money. Basically, DAOs are just a way of trading a well established legal system to settle disputes for one where whoever controls the protocols settles disputes in their favor.
- casi18 5y ago
  The blockchain always runs under social consensus. It is here for people not machines. Code isnt law, never has been, never will be. Because it would be insane to live in that world. When bitcoin accidentally overflowed and created 184billion bitcoin, it was forked away a few hours later because that isn't what the majority agreed upon. Same with ethereum, the majority decided something and it becomes the agreed state, as it does with every block. Its strange we still have to explain this 5 years later.
  - atweiden 5y ago
    A fairer comparison would be to that of MtGox, three years earlier, in which approximately 10X as much money was stolen from early Bitcoiners, but which did not result in any clawback of funds. Conversely, in the “billion bitcoin bug” situation, no funds were stolen from anyone — 51% of mining power merely chainforked to a non-buggy version of the network. FWIW an identical situation could happen today on Bitcoin via a 51% attack, but it probably would be rejected in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons. In both the MtGox and Ethereum DAO incident, the underlying network was functioning normally; but only one resulted in a clawback of funds from a sovereign entity. Notably, Ethereum had been advertising itself under the banner of “unstoppable applications” up to that point. Seemingly it’s a case of “unstoppable applications, not unstoppable applications”.
  - beambot 5y ago
    The DAO hack was "corrected" because it was big & loud, but countless others (esp small-time players) have been wronged without resolution. That seems to be a problem with the DAO... there's no mechanism to resolve small-time disputes if it doesn't rise to the consciousness of the masses (even if they would agree with such resolutions if pressed). By way of analogy: It's kind of like escalating Google customer service tickets through HN frontpage exposure. Our existing legal system "solves" this through the Judicial branch of government. The social consensus (Constitution) created a decentralized (but hierarchical) way to remediate wrongs both big & small. What is the DAO equivalent?
casi18 5y ago
I really enjoyed DaoHaus who make it easy to spin up a moloch dao in a few clicks -> https://app.daohaus.club/summon https://app.daohaus.club/summon and cheap to run on xdai (until rollups arrive then we can move there and get eth security too!) Also would recommend this article on dao relations too: https://medium.com/primedao/conceptual-models-for-dao2dao-relations-ac2b2d3cc84d https://medium.com/primedao/conceptual-models-for-dao2dao-re...
atweiden 5y ago
The worst part about reading these articles is how you can immediately tell they’re an advertorial for Ethereum. You’re one sentence into it, and you can already tell the target market is your disposable income. It makes you feel hustled. Like the internet equivalent of a one-room shop in a third world country.
jude- 5y ago
An Ethereum user makes up a bunch of terminology about DAOs and tries to assign the "DAO" label to things that are not really DAOs, all in a bid to "prove" an unsubstantiated belief that Bitcoin is "culturally centralized" and Ethereum is "culturally decentralized," whatever that means. Saved you a click.
yourabstraction 5y ago
I'm surprised to see the comments (at least at time of reading) are actually pretty positive, given the general distaste for cryptocurrency on hacker news. This reaffirms my view that the average HN commenter doesn't actually understand the innovations that are happening in the world of crypto, and merely parrots simple negative memes to get upvotes and reaffirm their belief in how it's a ponzi, or killing the environment, or enabling drug dealing and terrorism, or whatever flavor of the week thing it is. Thus when a post about a cool crypto use case (DAOs) pops up, people don't go for the immediate crypto = bad memes. It kinda reminds me of that time period where the media was perpetuating the meme that Bitcoin = bad, blockchain = good. Which missed the entire point, because there is simply no way to separate the two. I think a lot of it comes from the moral dilemmas in the world of finance and it making people uncomfortable and prone to virtue signaling via negative comments. Like it or not, the financial system is what allows the efficient allocation of capital for all the innovations people around here love so much. It may be a slimy immoral world, but it's currently the best engine we have to power the world. The dream with crypto is to build a better financial engine to power global trade and innovation. It's a lot harder to understand a fundamental global revolution than it is to bash it. I'd encourage everyone here to get more familiar with the world of crypto, because it's not going away and you're going to look back and feel very silly if you keep calling it tulip mania.
- u385639 5y ago
  Okay please share what made it click to you as a "fundamental global revolution"
  - dntrkv 5y ago
    For me it was when I finally understood that Ethereum is a decentralized, globally accessible API, that anyone can extend, nobody can take down, and it's all driven by its builtin currency that incentivizes good behavior. Honestly, with all of the complaints on HN about companies revoking API access, and any other of the multitude of complaints about centralized solutions, you would think the HN crowd would be onboard.
    - 5y ago

56 points by bpierre 5y ago

Missing the point. These things are supposed to exist for pure marketing blitz, it doesn't matter if they're actually decenteralized or even outright fraudulent. It just has to help bring in enough new suckers to allow the recipients of ethereum's huge pre-mine (now valued at about one quarter trillion dollars) to exit more of their positions without collapsing the price.

chrisco255 5y ago
No one person controls more than 1% of ETH supply. Satoshi still owns 1M BTC, or 5% of all BTC and it's said that the Winklevoss twins control about 1% of BTC supply.
- nullc 5y ago
  We don't actually know much about who controls the eth supply. Their pre-mine recipients were mostly anonymous and with the fast majority going to a few addresses. For all you know they recycled received funds back out in their crowd sale and bought multiple times. Participation was limited because US residents-- by far the largest population of cryptocurrency users-- were prohibited from participating (though of course some did). [Edit: A comment below claims otherwise, I don't actually see support for that in my source, and my own correspondence from the time states that it wasn't. I'm not sure if something changed around the launch, or if I'm somehow mistaken.] I dunno anything about winklevoss speculation, people often include funds held in custody as if they're owned by the custodian and reach weird conclusions. It's easy to list ethereum accounts that hold >=1% of all ethereum: 0x281055afc982d96fab65b3a49cac8b878184cb16, 0x6f46cf5569aefa1acc1009290c8e043747172d89, 0x90e63c3d53e0ea496845b7a03ec7548b70014a91, 0x53d284357ec70ce289d6d64134dfac8e511c8a3d, 0xab7c74abc0c4d48d1bdad5dcb26153fc8780f83e, 0xfe9e8709d3215310075d67e3ed32a380ccf451c8; while the largest Bitcoin address is under 1%. (Of course, parties can have multiple addresses, and as mentioned some parties hold coins for many other people) Moreover, regardless of the distribution Bitcoin had no premine: Everyone who has Bitcoin received it in a open process available to the whole world with no particular privilege other than knowing and caring about it when it was almost worthless before other people did. (well, I suppose except for those people who stole theirs :)). We don't actually know how many Bitcoin Satoshi-- if he's still alive-- owns: there are guesses based on assuming various earlier miners might have been him, but they're guesses. The 1M claim specifically is flat out false: it comes from counting up every coin mined during the first year that was still on spent at the time the figure started circulating a few years ago. It includes many coins known to have been mined by other people, including likely myself.
  - DennisP 5y ago
    U.S. residents were not prohibited. Here's the official announcement saying so: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/22/launching-the-ether-sale/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/22/launching-the-ether-sal...
  - nocommentguy 5y ago
    Hi Greg, > For all you know they recycled received funds back out in their crowd sale and bought multiple times. Actually we know that they didn’t and so do you, because the funds didn’t leave the multisig until the sale ended
    - nullc 5y ago
      Turns out that money is fungible. The moment the crowdsale ended the CEO paid himself out a million dollars and left. ...
      - knowaveragejoe 5y ago
        Do you have a source for this claim?
- seigando 5y ago
  Wow. that puts him in the top 30 richest people on earth...according to https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#233e45c53d78 https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#233e45c53d78 which i randomly googled.
anotha1 5y ago
I hope your wrong, for the sake of all the folks that invested in this.
- nocommentguy 5y ago
  Thank you for looking out for my financial well-being, internet stranger
knowaveragejoe 5y ago
Ethereum's pre-mine is worth more than half of ETH's market cap?
- yaa_minu 5y ago
  Yes, 70% premine. Absolutely unethical
  - knowaveragejoe 5y ago
    How does one learn this information? Do you have a link?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - DennisP 5y ago
      https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/22/launching-the-ether-sale/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/22/launching-the-ether-sal...
      - nullc 5y ago
        "We are not blocking the US after all. Yay." I hope you can see why many people believed the US was prohibited.
        DennisP 5y ago
        Yes, if they weren't paying attention. There was serious concern that the Ethereum Foundation would get in trouble with the SEC if they sold in the US. They delayed the crowdsale for several months while they consulted lawyers, who finally signed off on a way to keep them out of SEC trouble. There was a lot of discussion about this in the community. The presale was open for 42 days and very well known in the crypto community. Within the first few days it was clear that it was going to be one of the largest crowdsales to date, so it got regular media attention too.
nocommentguy 5y ago
This user is Greg Maxwell, who works full-time on internet arguments on behalf of AXA ventures, the organization that deliberately crippled Bitcoin in an attempt to monetize sidechains. Since that failed, he has been relegated to simple FUD while his handlers accumulate ETH.
- nullc 5y ago
  I've never spoken to anyone at AXA as far as I know, FWIW. Of course, the rest of your smearing is similarly nonsense.
miohtama 5y ago
I did a thread on the evolution of cryptocurrencies today. I cover the term “premine.” Your arguments do not make sense. https://mobile.twitter.com/moo9000/status/1389571466002325510 https://mobile.twitter.com/moo9000/status/138957146600232551...

seibelj 5y ago

If you want to see a graph about why many are so bullish on Ethereum - https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F110fd6e9-505a-4f91-b36c-cc1bf95f22be_1354x708.png https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p... Blockchain is like the early days of the internet, probably like 1998 right now. There were competitors to all the major internet protocols - TCP/IP, WWW, HTTP, but once everyone standardized the web flourished. I believe Ethereum is like that today. There are competitors, and loud internet commenters are financially incentivized to criticize it and promote others, but if you look at where organic development and new projects are founded on, Ethereum is far and away the most popular. Others are not even close. Other chains who criticize the fees of Ethereum are essentially saying, "That place is so crowded, nobody goes there anymore." ETH is working on scaling, bit by bit, and now with Layer-2 solutions like Optimism, Arbitrum, Matic/Polygon, zkSync, Immutable, etc. etc. it's finally allowing scale in a significant way even before ETH2 is launched and takes over. Many chains pay projects to port their dapps to their own chain just to get some sort of third-party development, while the Ethereum Foundation primarily funds fundamental research and protocol improvements - Ethereum doesn't need to pay people to build on their chain. If an alternative blockchain's only reason to exist is "Like Ethereum - but with lower fees!" I would be leery. Some chains like Monero exist with a very defined purpose (privacy), and I see Bitcoin as something else entirely (store of value). But as the one-chain-to-rule-them-all, Ethereum would be your best bet.

knowaveragejoe 5y ago
The graph is a few years out of date, fwiw.
- seibelj 5y ago
  True - but as a longtime crypto pro the sentiment is still accurate IMO. See recent article https://decrypt.co/66740/who-are-the-fastest-growing-developer-communities-in-crypto https://decrypt.co/66740/who-are-the-fastest-growing-develop... > There are more than 8,000 monthly active developers working on various cryptocurrency projects, according to the Developer Report, produced by Electric Capital, a venture firm, with some 80% of those developers starting in the last two years. > The current leader in terms of people actively contributing to the development of a network is Ethereum, with approximately 2,300 average monthly developers - those who were active on a monthly basis, according to the Developer Report. The number actively working on Ethereum has grown by 215% in 3 years.

chrisco255 5y ago

This article is a good overview of DAOs but spends a lot of time on terminology and taxonomy, without necessarily painting a clear picture to someone not familiar with DAOs as to how they operate in the wild today and perhaps how they will in the future. I continue to believe that DAOs are one of the most disruptive technologies of the 21st century. The ability to coordinate humans and capital in a decentralized way is powerful and will be used for everything from for-profit initiatives to non-profit foundations. The pluggable, open-source nature of these systems means that DAO treasury management and governance will become more and more sophisticated with time. Eventually, many of us are going to end up taking jobs working for DAOs.

anotha1 5y ago
> most disruptive technologies of the 21st century. I couldn't agree more. Though, as far as this article goes, I was looking for more of a playbook than high-level market analysis.
highfrequency 5y ago
What is the argument? Why would we expect a version of Apple with decentralized governance to outperform the current Apple?
- 21eleven 5y ago
  Because the governance structures of DAOs will be open source smart contracts they will be, in theory, easier to iterate upon and improve.
- tedunangst 5y ago
  The DAO Apple would vote to make iPhones with replaceable batteries, which as we all know, is what the market actually wants.
- casi18 5y ago
  It is an interesting question, but what would outperforming Apple look like? and on what timescale? Is it being more profitable? Having happier workers? Making the sleekest shiny things? And are we thinking for the next year or the next hundred years? Decentralized organisations seem (to me) to be prioritising resilience over efficiency. This seems like a long game. But perhaps shared ownership and pseudonymous employment will appeal to people. And perhaps sourcing workers anywhere in the world will lead to quick contacts building and fast deployment too. Or it could get caught up in bureaucracy, but then we can just fork the daos and vampire attack them! There is a lot a vague murkyness in national law as to who is responsible/where is tax payed/what is it, but the idea of being able to click a button and i have a borderless organisation with voting systems and memberships all ready to go to anyone who wants to join in is pretty exciting. Think of the crazy possibilities of collisions happening, people to meet, ideas to be generated. If we increase the speed at which people, ideas, and capital can come together that can be explosive (and that could be good or bad). We can have groups of strangers round the world seeding startups of anonymous teenagers writing code after school, before the university lecturers and vcs ever get to them. Thats radical and revolutionary. DAOs are the most exciting thing going in crypto imo.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

I lost a lot of faith in DAO and the whole code as contract when the proponents abandoned it as soon as they lost substantial money. When someone found a way to make a lot of money from the DAO contract, instead of congratulating them for using the letter of the contract to make money, the owners of the DAO suddenly started calling it theft and hacking and changed the protocol to make recover their money. Basically, DAOs are just a way of trading a well established legal system to settle disputes for one where whoever controls the protocols settles disputes in their favor.

casi18 5y ago
The blockchain always runs under social consensus. It is here for people not machines. Code isnt law, never has been, never will be. Because it would be insane to live in that world. When bitcoin accidentally overflowed and created 184billion bitcoin, it was forked away a few hours later because that isn't what the majority agreed upon. Same with ethereum, the majority decided something and it becomes the agreed state, as it does with every block. Its strange we still have to explain this 5 years later.
- atweiden 5y ago
  A fairer comparison would be to that of MtGox, three years earlier, in which approximately 10X as much money was stolen from early Bitcoiners, but which did not result in any clawback of funds. Conversely, in the “billion bitcoin bug” situation, no funds were stolen from anyone — 51% of mining power merely chainforked to a non-buggy version of the network. FWIW an identical situation could happen today on Bitcoin via a 51% attack, but it probably would be rejected in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons. In both the MtGox and Ethereum DAO incident, the underlying network was functioning normally; but only one resulted in a clawback of funds from a sovereign entity. Notably, Ethereum had been advertising itself under the banner of “unstoppable applications” up to that point. Seemingly it’s a case of “unstoppable applications, not unstoppable applications”.
- beambot 5y ago
  The DAO hack was "corrected" because it was big & loud, but countless others (esp small-time players) have been wronged without resolution. That seems to be a problem with the DAO... there's no mechanism to resolve small-time disputes if it doesn't rise to the consciousness of the masses (even if they would agree with such resolutions if pressed). By way of analogy: It's kind of like escalating Google customer service tickets through HN frontpage exposure. Our existing legal system "solves" this through the Judicial branch of government. The social consensus (Constitution) created a decentralized (but hierarchical) way to remediate wrongs both big & small. What is the DAO equivalent?

casi18 5y ago

I really enjoyed DaoHaus who make it easy to spin up a moloch dao in a few clicks -> https://app.daohaus.club/summon https://app.daohaus.club/summon and cheap to run on xdai (until rollups arrive then we can move there and get eth security too!) Also would recommend this article on dao relations too: https://medium.com/primedao/conceptual-models-for-dao2dao-relations-ac2b2d3cc84d https://medium.com/primedao/conceptual-models-for-dao2dao-re...

atweiden 5y ago

The worst part about reading these articles is how you can immediately tell they’re an advertorial for Ethereum. You’re one sentence into it, and you can already tell the target market is your disposable income. It makes you feel hustled. Like the internet equivalent of a one-room shop in a third world country.

jude- 5y ago

An Ethereum user makes up a bunch of terminology about DAOs and tries to assign the "DAO" label to things that are not really DAOs, all in a bid to "prove" an unsubstantiated belief that Bitcoin is "culturally centralized" and Ethereum is "culturally decentralized," whatever that means. Saved you a click.

yourabstraction 5y ago

I'm surprised to see the comments (at least at time of reading) are actually pretty positive, given the general distaste for cryptocurrency on hacker news. This reaffirms my view that the average HN commenter doesn't actually understand the innovations that are happening in the world of crypto, and merely parrots simple negative memes to get upvotes and reaffirm their belief in how it's a ponzi, or killing the environment, or enabling drug dealing and terrorism, or whatever flavor of the week thing it is. Thus when a post about a cool crypto use case (DAOs) pops up, people don't go for the immediate crypto = bad memes. It kinda reminds me of that time period where the media was perpetuating the meme that Bitcoin = bad, blockchain = good. Which missed the entire point, because there is simply no way to separate the two. I think a lot of it comes from the moral dilemmas in the world of finance and it making people uncomfortable and prone to virtue signaling via negative comments. Like it or not, the financial system is what allows the efficient allocation of capital for all the innovations people around here love so much. It may be a slimy immoral world, but it's currently the best engine we have to power the world. The dream with crypto is to build a better financial engine to power global trade and innovation. It's a lot harder to understand a fundamental global revolution than it is to bash it. I'd encourage everyone here to get more familiar with the world of crypto, because it's not going away and you're going to look back and feel very silly if you keep calling it tulip mania.

u385639 5y ago
Okay please share what made it click to you as a "fundamental global revolution"
- dntrkv 5y ago
  For me it was when I finally understood that Ethereum is a decentralized, globally accessible API, that anyone can extend, nobody can take down, and it's all driven by its builtin currency that incentivizes good behavior. Honestly, with all of the complaints on HN about companies revoking API access, and any other of the multitude of complaints about centralized solutions, you would think the HN crowd would be onboard.
  - 5y ago